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