person was employed as my nurse, and a great deal of quarrelling was the
result of her coming. I quite wonder my uncle did not put me away at
board somewhere, rather than be disturbed. But in truth, I do not
believe that the quarrelling disturbed him much, or that he paid much
attention to the matter, and so the matter settled itself. My nurses
were changed very often, by will of the cook and old Peter, and I never
was happy enough to have one who had very high principle, or was more
than ordinarily good-tempered.

I don't know who selected my teachers; probably they applied for
employment and were received. They were very business-like and
unsuggestive people. I was of no more interest to them than a bale of
goods, I believe. Indeed, I seemed likely to go a bale of goods through
life; everything that was done for me was done for money, and with a
view to the benefit of the person serving me. I was not sent to school,
which was a very great pity; it was owing to the fact, no doubt, that
somebody applied to my uncle to teach me at home, and so the system was
inaugurated, and never received a second thought, and I went on being
taught at home till I was seventeen.

The "home" was as follows; a large dark house on the unsunny side of a
dull street; furniture that had not been changed for forty years, walls
that were seldom repainted, windows that were rarely opened. The
neighborhood had been for many years unfashionable and undesirable, and,
by the time I was grown up, nobody would have lived in it, who had cared
to have a cheerful home, I might almost have said, a respectable one, I
fancy ours was nearly the only house in the block occupied by its owner;
the others, equally large, were rented for tenement houses, or
boarding-houses, and perhaps for many things worse. It was probably
owing to this fact, that my uncle gave orders, once for all, I was never