hundred acres would give.

These visions were now at an end. No doubt her own interest would be, to
this woman, the supreme law, and this would be considered as
irreconcilably hostile to mine. My father would easily be moulded to
her purpose, and that act easily extorted from him which should reduce
me to beggary. She had a gross and perverse taste. She had a numerous
kindred, indigent and hungry. On these his substance would speedily be
lavished. Me she hated, because she was conscious of having injured me,
because she knew that I held her in contempt, and because I had detected
her in an illicit intercourse with the son of a neighbour.

The house in which I lived was no longer my own, nor even my father's.
Hitherto I had thought and acted in it with the freedom of a master; but
now I was become, in my own conceptions, an alien and an enemy to the
roof under which I was born. Every tie which had bound me to it was
dissolved or converted into something which repelled me to a distance
from it. I was a guest whose presence was borne with anger and
impatience.

I was fully impressed with the necessity of removal, but I knew not
whither to go, or what kind of subsistence to seek. My father had been a
Scottish emigrant, and had no kindred on this side of the ocean. My
mother's family lived in New Hampshire, and long separation had
extinguished all the rights of relationship in her offspring. Tilling
the earth was my only profession, and, to profit by my skill in it, it
would be necessary to become a day-labourer in the service of strangers;
but this was a destiny to which I, who had so long enjoyed the pleasures
of independence and command, could not suddenly reconcile myself. It
occurred to me that the city might afford me an asylum. A short day's