My father becomes a bankrupt: Flies the country: Lists for an East India soldier, and dies on ship-board: Distress of my mother; and the beginning of my misfortunes: I am bound apprentice: Characteristic traits of my master: The dreadful sufferings I undergo; and my narrow escapes with life
Young as I was, I perfectly remember that the strange departure of my uncle Elford produced a very sensible effect upon me. It may well be imagined that, when my understanding was more mature, the perusal of this affectionate letter, and the recollection of his kindness to me in my days of childhood, excited no little emotion.
As for my aunt, prepared as she had been for some violent catastrophe to their quarrelling, she was either so struck by the letter and the remembrance of past follies, or so fearful of the comments and scrutiny of the neighbourhood, that within a month after he was missing she quitted the country, and went to reside at the city of ****, where in less than a year she died. Her departure was private, and the place of her retreat was not known till her last illness; when intelligence was sent to the rector, to whom she bequeathed such property as she possessed.
The absence of my uncle contributed to hasten the approach of that cloudy reverse at which I have already hinted. For some time the ruin of my father's affairs had been prevented by the sums which his eloquence had wrung from the well-meaning Mr. Elford. Hugh was no contemptible orator on these occasions. Hope seldom forsook him, and he built so securely on what he hoped might come to pass as sometimes to assert the thing had already happened. Such convenient mistakes are daily made. If indeed the good graces of fortune would but have kept pace with his expectations, England would not have afforded a more flourishing or gallant yeoman. But, like monopolizers in general, he was apt to speculate a little too deeply. Eager to enjoy, he was impatient to obtain the means of enjoyment. So that, at one time, the turning up of the jack at all fours was to make his fortune; but how provoking! it happened to be the ten: at another it depended on a duck-wing cock, which (who could have foreseen so strange an accident?) disgraced the best feeder in the kingdom, by running away: and it more than once did not want half a neck's length of being realized by a favourite horse; yet was lost, contrary to the most accurate calculations which, as the learned in these matters affirm, had been made from Wheatherby's Racing Calendar.
Thus to repeated disappointments in his bets and his bargains, and to his neglect of his farming affairs, it was owing that, in anno domini —— when I was nine years and a half old, after having expended the property with which he had been supplied, and incurred debts to the amount of little less than a thousand pounds, my father found it prudent to depart by night in the basket of the stage coach for London. And prudent it certainly was, for his effects had not only been seized in execution of a bond and judgment, but the bailiffs from all quarters were at his heels.
My mother at this time was pregnant; the sister I have mentioned was dead; but I had a fine healthy brother about three years old, and it was agreed that we should follow to the great city, as soon as he had found employment; which, according to his notions, was the most easy thing imaginable.
It so happened, however, that he had not been there a full month before the trifling sum he and my mother had collected for his immediate existence was lost, by the turn of a die; contrary to his certain conviction that he had discovered, at a hazard table, the ready way to repair all past mistakes.
To send for wife and children was now out of the question. Destitute of support, without the means of obtaining another shilling, after fasting a day and a half, his courage, that is his appetite, could hold out no longer, and he enlisted for an East-India soldier; having first convinced himself, by the soundest arguments, that he should immediately be made a serjeant; which perhaps was no improbable calculation; that he should then soon get a commission, and that he should undoubtedly return a commanding officer, or general in chief, to the surprise of his friends and the utter confusion of the rector, and all those whom he accounted his persecutors.
That these great events might not actually have happened who shall pretend to say? Miracles of old were plentiful; and even in these unbelieving days strange things have come to pass. But all his unbounded hopes, many of which he had stated in his last letter to my mother, were unexpectedly subverted, by an accident to which it appears men in general are subject. He caught a fever, while the ship in which he was to be a passenger lay waiting in the Downs for a wind; and, in spite of the surgeon and his whole chest of medicines, died: of all which events there was a circumstantial account, transmitted by one of his comrades to my mother.
The ruin of prospects so fair, the desolation of a house and homeless woman, with two orphan children, and pregnant of a third, and the loss of a husband, who at the worst of times had always kept hope alive, were sufficient causes of affliction to my mother. Tears were plentifully shed, and daily and nightly wailings were indulged.