With this resolve I went out and spent two pounds of my little capital in books. It was a scanty library, but I arrayed it on a table next my window with pride and satisfaction. I turned over the leaves of my dictionary with something of the feeling with which a settler in a new region of the globe might have wandered through his little territory.
My grammars I regarded as mines whose ores were to enrich me; and my well-thumbed copy of Telemachus, and an odd volume of Lessing's comedies, were in themselves stores of pleasure and amusement. I suppose it is a condition of the human mind that makes our enjoyments in the ratio of the sacrifices they have cost us. I know of myself, that since that day I now speak of, it has been my fortune to be wealthy, to possess around me every luxury my wish could compass, and yet I will own it, that I have never gazed on the well-filled shelves of a costly library, replete with every comfort, with a tithe of the satisfaction I then contemplated the two or three dog-eared volumes that lay before me.
My first few days of liberty were passed in planning out the future. I studied the newspapers in hope of meeting something adapted to my capacity; but though in appearance no lack of these, I invariably found some fatal obstacle intervened to prevent my success. At one place, the requirements were beyond my means; at another, the salary was insufficient for bare support; and at one I remember my functions of teacher were to be united with menial offices against which my pride revolted. I resolved to adventure at last, and opened a little school,—an evening school for those whose occupations made the day too valuable to devote any part of it to education.
At the end of some five weeks I had three pupils; hard-working and hard-worked men they were, who, steadily bent upon advancement in life, now entered upon a career of labor far greater than all they had ever encountered.
Two were about to emigrate, and their studies were geography, with some natural history, and whatever I could acquire for them of information about the resources of a certain portion of Upper Canada. The third was a weaver, and desired to learn French in order to read the works of French mathematicians, at that time sparingly translated into English. He was a man of superior intellect, and capable of a high cultivation, but poor to the very last degree. The thirst for knowledge had possessed him exactly as the passion for gambling lays hold of some other men; he lived for nothing else. The defeats and difficulties he encountered but served to brace him to further efforts, and he seemed to forget all his privations and his poverty in the aim of his glorious pursuit.
To keep in advance of him in his knowledge, I found impossible. All that I could do was to aid him in acquiring French, which, strange to say, presented great difficulties to him. He however made me a partaker of his own enthusiasm, and I worked hard and long at pursuits for which my habits of mind and thought little adapted me. I need scarcely say that all this time my worldly wealth made no progress. My scholars were very poor themselves, and the pittance I earned from them I had oftentimes to refuse accepting. Each day showed my little resources growing smaller, and my hopes held out no better prospect for the future.
Was I to struggle on thus to the last, and sink under the pressure? was now the question that kept perpetually rising to my mind. My poverty had now descended to actual misery; my clothes were ragged; my shoes scarcely held together; more than once an entire day would pass without my breaking my fast.
I lost all zest for life, and wandered about in lonely and unfrequented places, in a half-dreamy state, too vague to be called melancholy. My mind, at this time, vacillated between a childish timidity and a species of almost savage ferocity. At some moments tears would steal along my cheeks, and my heart vibrated to the very finest emotions; at others, I was possessed with an almost demoniac fierceness, that seemed only in search of some object to wreak its vengeance upon. A strange impression, however, haunted me through both these opposite states, and this was, that my life was menaced by some one or other, and that I went in hourly peril of assassination. This sense of danger impressed me with either a miserable timidity, or a reckless, even an insolent, intrepidity.
By degrees, all other thoughts were merged in this one, and every incident, no matter how trifling, served to strengthen and confirm it. Fortunately for my reader, I have no patience to trace out the fancies by which I was haunted. I imagined that kings and emperors were in the conspiracy against me, and that cabinets only plotted how to entrap me. I sold the last remnant of my wardrobe and my few remaining books, and quitted my dwelling, to forsake it again for another, after a few days. Grim want was, at length, before me, and I found myself one morning—it was a cold one of December—with only a few pence remaining. It chanced to be one of my days of calmer temperament; for some previous ones I had been in a state bordering on frenzy; and now the reaction had left me weak and depressed, but reasonable.
I went over, to myself, as well as I was able, all my previous life; I tried to recall the names of the few with whom my fate seemed to connect me, and of whose whereabouts I knew nothing; I canvassed in my own mind how much might be true of these stories which I used to hear of my birth and parentage, and whether the whole might not possibly have been invented to conceal some darker history. Such doubts had possibly not assailed me in other times; but now, with broken hopes and shattered strength, they took a bold possession of me. I actually possessed nothing which might serve to confirm my pretension to station. Documents or papers I had none; nor was there, so far as I knew, a living witness to bear testimony to my narrative. In pondering thus I suddenly remembered that, in the letter which I once had addressed to Mr. Pitt, were enclosed some few memoranda in corroboration of my story.