old country seat. So much did the idea amuse me, that I took to
scribbling about it under the trees in the park; and in a few days had
made some progress in a poem, in which I had given a description of the
place, under the name of Doubting Castle, and personified my uncle as
Giant Despair.

I lost my poem somewhere about the house, and I soon suspected that my
uncle had found it; as he harshly intimated to me that I could return
home, and that I need not come and see him again until he should send
for me.

Just about this time my mother died.--I cannot dwell upon this
circumstance; my heart, careless and wayworn as it is, gushes with the
recollection. Her death was an event that perhaps gave a turn to all my
after fortunes. With her died all that made home attractive, for my
father was harsh, as I have before said, and had never treated me with
kindness. Not that he exerted any unusual severity towards me, but it
was his way. I do not complain of him. In fact, I have never been of a
complaining disposition. I seem born to be buffeted by friends and
fortune, and nature has made me a careless endurer of buffetings.

I now, however, began to grow very impatient of remaining at school, to
be flogged for things that I did not like. I longed for variety,
especially now that I had not my uncle's to resort to, by way of
diversifying the dullness of school with the dreariness of his country
seat. I was now turned of sixteen; tall for my age, and full of idle
fancies. I had a roving, inextinguishable desire to see different kinds
of life, and different orders of society; and this vagrant humor had
been fostered in me by Tom Dribble, the prime wag and great genius of
the school, who had all the rambling propensities of a poet.