ame aware of it. The young men with whom I
had associated, in barrooms and parlors, and who wore a little better
clothing than I could afford, one after another began to drop my
acquaintance. If I walked in the public streets, I too quickly
perceived the cold look, the averted eye, the half recognition, and to
a sensitive spirit such as I possessed such treatment was almost past
endurance. To add to the mortification caused by such a state of
things, it happened that those who had laughed the loudest at my songs
and stories, and who had been social enough with me in the barroom,
were the very individuals who seemed most ashamed of my acquaintance.
I felt that I was shunned by the respectable portion of the community
also; and once, on asking a lad to accompany me in a walk, he informed
me that his father had cautioned him against associating with me. This
was a cutting reproof, and I felt it more deeply than words can
express. And could I wonder at it? No. Although I may have used
bitter words against that parent, my conscience told me that he had
done no more than his duty in preventing his son being influenced by my
dissipated habits. Oh! how often have I lain down and bitterly
remembered many who had hailed my arrival in their company as a joyous
event. Their plaudits would resound in my ears, and peals of laughter
ring again in my deserted chamber; then would succeed stillness, broken
only by the beatings of my agonized heart, which felt that the gloss of
respectability had worn off and exposed my threadbare condition. To
drown these reflections, I would drink, not from love of the taste of
the liquor, but to become so stupefied by its fumes as to steep my
sorrows in a half oblivion; and from this miserable stupor I would wake
to a fuller consciousness of my situation, and again would I banish my
reflections by liquor.

There lived in Newburyport at that time a Mr. Law, who was a rum
seller, and I had spent many a shilling at his bar; he proposed to me
that he would purchase some tools, and I could start a bindery on my
own account, paying him by installments. He did so; and I thought it
an act of great kindness then, and for some time afterward, till I
found he had received pay from me for tools he had never paid for
himself, and I was dunned for the account he had failed to settle. He
even borrowed seventy-five dollars from me after I signed the pledge,
which has never been repaid. "Such is life."