"I stole now, from absolute necessity,--bread; yet whatever else was
taken, which I had it not in my power to take, was ascribed to me. I was
the filching cat, the ravenous dog, the dumb brute, who must bear all;
for if I endeavoured to exculpate myself, I was silenced, without any
enquiries being made, with 'Hold your tongue, you never tell truth.'
Even the very air I breathed was tainted with scorn; for I was sent
to the neighbouring shops with Glutton, Liar, or Thief, written on my
forehead. This was, at first, the most bitter punishment; but sullen
pride, or a kind of stupid desperation, made me, at length, almost
regardless of the contempt, which had wrung from me so many solitary
tears at the only moments when I was allowed to rest.

"Thus was I the mark of cruelty till my sixteenth year; and then I have
only to point out a change of misery; for a period I never knew.
Allow me first to make one observation. Now I look back, I cannot help
attributing the greater part of my misery, to the misfortune of having
been thrown into the world without the grand support of life--a mother's
affection. I had no one to love me; or to make me respected, to enable
me to acquire respect. I was an egg dropped on the sand; a pauper by
nature, hunted from family to family, who belonged to nobody--and nobody
cared for me. I was despised from my birth, and denied the chance of
obtaining a footing for myself in society. Yes; I had not even the
chance of being considered as a fellow-creature--yet all the people with
whom I lived, brutalized as they were by the low cunning of trade, and
the despicable shifts of poverty, were not without bowels, though they
never yearned for me. I was, in fact, born a slave, and chained by
infamy to slavery during the whole of existence, without having any
companions to alleviate it by sympathy, or teach me how to rise above it
by their example. But, to resume the thread of my tale--