Dear Brother,—­Yours of March 7th I received, and thank you for your care in despatching so speedily the business I desired you to do.  It is the last of that kind I shall trouble you with.  No more shall I write or receive letters to and from that person.  But lest you should run into a mistake and think we have quarrelled, I assure you we are perfect friends; we think, wish and judge alike, but what avails it?  We are both miserable.  He has not differed with my mother, but she loves him not, because she esteems him the unlucky cause of a deep melancholy in a beloved child.  For his own sake it is that I cease writing, because it is now his interest to forget me.

Whether you will be engaged before thirty or not, I cannot determine; but if my advice be worth listening to, never engage your affections before your worldly affairs are in such a position that you may marry very soon.  The contrary practice has proved very pernicious in our family; and were I to live my time over again, and had the same experience as I have now, were it for the best man in England, I would not wait one year.  I know you are a young man, encompassed with difficulties, that has passed through many hardships already, and probably must pass through many more before you are easy in the world; but, believe me, if ever you come to suffer the torment of a hopeless love, all other afflictions will seem small in comparison of it.  And that you may not think I speak at random, take some account of my past life, more than ever I spoke to anyone.

After the fire, when I was seventeen years old, I was left alone with my mother, and lived easy for one year, having most necessaries, though few diversions, and never going abroad.  Yet after working all day I read some pleasant book at night, and was contented enough; but after we were gotten into our house, and all the family were settled, in about a year’s time I began to find out that we were ruined.  Then came on London journeys, Convocations of blessed memory, that for seven years my father was at London, and we at home in intolerable want and affliction.  Then I learnt what it was to seek money for bread, seldom having any without such hardships in getting it that much abated the pleasure of it.  Thus we went on, growing worse and worse; all us children in scandalous want of necessaries for years together; vast income, but no comfort or credit with it.  Then I went to London with design to get into some service, failed of that, and grew acquainted with Leybourne.  Ever after that I lived in close correspondence with him.  When anything grieved me, he was my comforter; and what though our affairs grew no better, yet I was tolerably easy, thinking his love sufficient recompense for the absence of all other worldly comforts.  Then ill fate, in the shape of a near relation, laid the groundwork of my misery, and—­joined with my mother’s command and my own indiscretion-broke the correspondence