“I stole now, from absolute necessity,—­bread; yet whatever else was taken, which I had it not in my power to take, was ascribed to me.  I was the filching cat, the ravenous dog, the dumb brute, who must bear all; for if I endeavoured to exculpate myself, I was silenced, without any enquiries being made, with ‘Hold your tongue, you never tell truth.’  Even the very air I breathed was tainted with scorn; for I was sent to the neighbouring shops with Glutton, Liar, or Thief, written on my forehead.  This was, at first, the most bitter punishment; but sullen pride, or a kind of stupid desperation, made me, at length, almost regardless of the contempt, which had wrung from me so many solitary tears at the only moments when I was allowed to rest.

“Thus was I the mark of cruelty till my sixteenth year; and then I have only to point out a change of misery; for a period I never knew.  Allow me first to make one observation.  Now I look back, I cannot help attributing the greater part of my misery, to the misfortune of having been thrown into the world without the grand support of life—­a mother’s affection.  I had no one to love me; or to make me respected, to enable me to acquire respect.  I was an egg dropped on the sand; a pauper by nature, hunted from family to family, who belonged to nobody—­and nobody cared for me.  I was despised from my birth, and denied the chance of obtaining a footing for myself in society.  Yes; I had not even the chance of being considered as a fellow-creature—­yet all the people with whom I lived, brutalized as they were by the low cunning of trade, and the despicable shifts of poverty, were not without bowels, though they never yearned for me.  I was, in fact, born a slave, and chained by infamy to slavery during the whole of existence, without having any companions to alleviate it by sympathy, or teach me how to rise above it by their example.  But, to resume the thread of my tale—­

“At sixteen, I suddenly grew tall, and something like comeliness appeared on a Sunday, when I had time to wash my face, and put on clean clothes.  My master had once or twice caught hold of me in the passage; but I instinctively avoided his disgusting caresses.  One day however, when the family were at a methodist meeting, he contrived to be alone in the house with me, and by blows—­yes; blows and menaces, compelled me to submit to his ferocious desire; and, to avoid my mistress’s fury, I was obliged in future to comply, and skulk to my loft at his command, in spite of increasing loathing.

“The anguish which was now pent up in my bosom, seemed to open a new world to me:  I began to extend my thoughts beyond myself, and grieve for human misery, till I discovered, with horror—­ah! what horror!—­that I was with child.  I know not why I felt a mixed sensation of despair and tenderness, excepting that, ever called a bastard, a bastard appeared to me an object of the greatest compassion in creation.