“As soon as this idea had become fully formed in my mind, I sold off all our little stock of furniture, and with the meager supply of clothing to which I had limited myself, ventured once more to try the perils of the sea.  After a quick passage, we arrived in Boston.  My father I at once had placed in the asylum, after having invested nearly every dollar I had in bank stock, the dividends from which were guaranteed to the institution for his support, so long as he remained one of its inmates.  This was early in the last fall.  I had then but a few dollars left, and no income.  I was in a strange city, dependent entirely upon my own resources.  And what were they?  ’What am I to do?  Where am I to go for employment?’ were questions I found hard indeed to answer.  Twenty dollars were all I possessed in the world; and this sum, at a hotel, would not last me, I knew, over two or three weeks.  I therefore sought out a private boarding-house, where, under an assumed name, I got a room and my board for two dollars a week.  The woman who kept the boarding-house, and to whom I communicated my wish to get sewing, gave me half a dozen plain shirts to make for her husband, for which I received fifty cents each.  This was all the work I obtained during the first two weeks I was in the house, and it yielded me only three dollars, when my boarding cost me four.  I felt a good deal discouraged after that.  I knew no one to whom I could go for work—­and the woman with whom I boarded could not recommend me to any place, except to the clothing-stores:  but they, she said, paid so badly that she would not advise me to go there, for I could not earn much over half what it would cost me for my board.  Still, she added, ’half a loaf is better than no bread.’  I felt that there was truth in this last remark, and, therefore, after getting the direction of a clothing-store, I went there and got a few pairs of coarse trowsers.  This kind of work was new to me.  In my ignorance, I made some portion of them wrong, for which I received abuse from the owner of the shop, and no money.  He was not going, he said, to pay me for having his work spoiled.

“Dreadfully disheartened, I returned to my lodgings, and set myself to ponder over some other means of support.  I had been, while at school, one of the best French and Spanish scholars in the seminary.  I had also given great attention to music, and could have taught it as skillfully as our musical professor.  But five years had passed since I touched the keys of a piano or harp, and I had not, during that time, spoken a dozen words in any language except my native tongue.  And, even if I had retained all my former skill and proficiency, my appearance was not such as to guarantee me, as a perfect stranger, any favorable reception either from private families or schools.  So anxious had I been to make the remnant of my father’s property, which a kind Providence had spared to us, meet our extreme need, that I denied myself every