as if each had something to forgive. With such kindness and such
forgiveness, but without the sorrow, may our next meeting be!

I was a youth of gay and happy temperament, with an incorrigible
levity of spirit, of no vicious propensities, sensible enough, but
wayward and fanciful. What a character was this to be brought in
contact with the stern old Pilgrim spirit of my guardian! We were
at variance on a thousand points; but our chief and final dispute
arose from the pertinacity with which he insisted on my adopting a
particular profession; while I, being heir to a moderate competence,
had avowed my purpose of keeping aloof from the regular business of
life. This would have been a dangerous resolution anywhere in the
world; it was fatal in New England. There is a grossness in the
conceptions of my countrymen; they will not be convinced that any
good thing may consist with what they call idleness; they can
anticipate nothing but evil of a young man who neither studies
physic, law, nor gospel, nor opens a store, nor takes to farming,
but manifests an incomprehensible disposition to be satisfied with
what his father left him. The principle is excellent in its general
influence, but most miserable in its effect on the few that violate
it. I had a quick sensitiveness to public opinion, and felt as if
it ranked me with the tavern haunters and town paupers,--with the
drunken poet who hawked his own Fourth of July odes, and the broken
soldier who had been good for nothing since last war. The
consequence of all this was a piece of light-hearted desperation.

I do not over-estimate my notoriety when I take it for granted that
many of my readers must have heard of me in the wild way of life
which I adopted. The idea of becoming a wandering story-teller had
been suggested, a year or two before, by an encounter with several