rstood by every unlucky wight in my
predicament, who has had the misfortune of being born to great
expectations.

I passed several days in rambling about the scenes of my boyhood;
partly because I absolutely did not know what to do with myself, and
partly because I did not know that I should ever see them again. I
clung to them as one clings to a wreck, though he knows he must
eventually cast himself loose and swim for his life. I sat down on a
hill within sight of my paternal home, but I did not venture to
approach it, for I felt compunction at the thoughtlessness with which I
had dissipated my patrimony. But was I to blame, when I had the rich
possessions of my curmudgeon of an uncle in expectation?

The new possessor of the place was making great alterations. The house
was almost rebuilt. The trees which stood about it were cut down; my
mother's flower-garden was thrown into a lawn; all was undergoing a
change. I turned my back upon it with a sigh, and rambled to another
part of the country.

How thoughtful a little adversity makes one. As I came in sight of the
school-house where I had so often been flogged in the cause of wisdom,
you would hardly have recognized the truant boy who but a few years
since had eloped so heedlessly from its walls. I leaned over the paling
of the playground, and watched the scholars at their games, and looked
to see if there might not be some urchin among them, like I was once,
full of gay dreams about life and the world. The play-ground seemed
smaller than when I used to sport about it. The house and park, too, of
the neighboring squire, the father of the cruel Sacharissa, had shrunk
in size and diminished in magnificence. The distant hills no longer
appeared so far off, and, alas! no longer awakened ideas of a fairy
land beyond.

As I was rambling pensively through a neighboring meadow, in which I
had many a time gathered primroses, I met the very pedagogue who had
been the tyrant and dread of my boyhood. I had sometimes vowed to
myself, when suffering under his rod, that I would have my revenge if
ever I met him when I had grown to be a man. The time had come; but I
had no disposition to keep my vow. The few years which had matured me
into a vigorous man had shrunk him into decrepitude. He appeared to
have had a paralytic stroke. I looked at him, and wondered that this
poor helpless mortal could have been an object of terror to me! That I
should have watched with anxiety the glan