life I care for.  Help me to lead it.  I ask you, first, as a beggar, to give me from your superfluity, apparel decent enough to bear the daylight.  I ask you next, to help me to some occupation which will just give me my bread, my shelter, and my hour or two of solitude in the evening.  You have plenty of influence to do this, and you know I am honest.  You cannot choose me too humble and obscure an employment; let me descend low enough to be lost to sight beneath the world I have lived in; let me go among people who want to know that I work honestly for them, and want to know nothing more.  Get me a mean hiding-place to conceal myself and my history in for ever, and then neither attempt to see me nor communicate with me again.  If former friends chance to ask after me, tell them I am dead, or gone into another country.  The wisest life is the life the animals lead:  I want, like them, to serve my master for food, shelter, and liberty to lie asleep now and then in the sunshine, without being driven away as a pest or a trespasser.  Do you believe in this resolution?—­it is my last.

“He did believe in it; and he granted what I asked.  Through his interference and recommendation, I entered the service of Mr. Sherwin.—­

“I must stop here for to-day.  To-morrow I shall come to disclosures of vital interest to you.  Have you been surprised that I, your enemy by every cause of enmity that one man can have against another, should write to you so fully about the secrets of my early life?  I have done so, because I wish the strife between us to be an open strife on my side; because I desire that you should know thoroughly what you have to expect from my character, after such a life as I have led.  There was purpose in my deceit, when I deceived you—­there is purpose in my frankness, when I now tell you all.”

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“I began in Mr. Sherwin’s employment, as the lowest clerk in his office.  Both the master and the men looked a little suspiciously on me, at first.  My account of myself was always the same—­simple and credible; I had entered the counting-house with the best possible recommendation, and I acted up to it.  These circumstances in my favour, joined to a manner that never varied, and to a steadiness at my work that never relaxed, soon produced their effect—­all curiosity about me gradually died away:  I was left to pursue my avocations in peace.  The friend who had got me my situation, preserved my secret as I had desired him; of all the people whom I had formerly known, pitiless enemies and lukewarm adherents, not one ever suspected that my hiding-place was the back office of a linen-draper’s shop.  For the first time in my life, I felt that the secret of my father’s misfortune was mine, and mine only; that my security from exposure was at length complete.