clung to me; but I could draw no conclusions from such feelings, to serve as a guide to action.  My first real knowledge of myself was as an unprotected orphan among the valleys and fells of Cumberland.  I was in the service of a farmer; and with crook in hand, my dog at my side, I shepherded a numerous flock on the near uplands.  I cannot say much in praise of such a life; and its pains far exceeded its pleasures.  There was freedom in it, a companionship with nature, and a reckless loneliness; but these, romantic as they were, did not accord with the love of action and desire of human sympathy, characteristic of youth.  Neither the care of my flock, nor the change of seasons, were sufficient to tame my eager spirit; my out-door life and unemployed time were the temptations that led me early into lawless habits.  I associated with others friendless like myself; I formed them into a band, I was their chief and captain.  All shepherd-boys alike, while our flocks were spread over the pastures, we schemed and executed many a mischievous prank, which drew on us the anger and revenge of the rustics.  I was the leader and protector of my comrades, and as I became distinguished among them, their misdeeds were usually visited upon me.  But while I endured punishment and pain in their defence with the spirit of an hero, I claimed as my reward their praise and obedience.

In such a school my disposition became rugged, but firm.  The appetite for admiration and small capacity for self-controul which I inherited from my father, nursed by adversity, made me daring and reckless.  I was rough as the elements, and unlearned as the animals I tended.  I often compared myself to them, and finding that my chief superiority consisted in power, I soon persuaded myself that it was in power only that I was inferior to the chiefest potentates of the earth.  Thus untaught in refined philosophy, and pursued by a restless feeling of degradation from my true station in society, I wandered among the hills of civilized England as uncouth a savage as the wolf-bred founder of old Rome.  I owned but one law, it was that of the strongest, and my greatest deed of virtue was never to submit.

Yet let me a little retract from this sentence I have passed on myself.  My mother, when dying, had, in addition to her other half-forgotten and misapplied lessons, committed, with solemn exhortation, her other child to my fraternal guardianship; and this one duty I performed to the best of my ability, with all the zeal and affection of which my nature was capable.  My sister was three years younger than myself; I had nursed her as an infant, and when the difference of our sexes, by giving us various occupations, in a great measure divided us, yet she continued to be the object of my careful love.  Orphans, in the fullest sense of the term, we were poorest among the poor, and despised among the unhonoured.  If my daring and courage obtained for me a kind of respectful aversion, her youth and sex, since they did not excite tenderness, by proving her to be weak, were the causes of numberless mortifications to her; and her own disposition was not so constituted as to diminish the evil effects of her lowly station.