my dear aunt that blessed
twilight-hour, which had proved the chief solace of my weary life.

Constant confinement to that close office preyed upon my health and
spirits. I became fretful and irritable, the colour left my cheeks, and
my eyes looked dull and heavy. The clerks, generally kind to me, all
pitied me, though they dared not openly show their regard. They brought
me presents of fruit and sweet-meats, and one who lived in the suburbs
used to delight my heart, every now and then, with a rich bouquet of
flowers. Their beauty and perfume brought back a glimpse of the old
times--dim visions of lawns and gardens, of singing-birds and
humming-bees; of a fair smiling creature who led me by the hand through
those bowers of enchantment, and called me her Geoffrey--her darling
boy.

When such thoughts came over me, my hand trembled, and I could not see
the parchment I was copying through my tears; but for all that, the
sight of the flowers was always inexpressibly dear, and I prized them
beyond every other gift.

I had been about eighteen months in the office, when my good Aunt
Rebecca died--an event sudden and unexpected by all. I was allowed to
see her in her last moments; to sob out my full heart by her death-bed.
Her last words were an earnest request to her husband to be kind to
poor Geoffrey, for her sake: she died--and I felt myself alone and
friendless in the world.

CHAPTER VI.

THE SORROWS OF DEPENDENCE.

My heart sickens over this dreary portion of my life. I have heard
childhood called the happiest season of life. To me it had few joys. It
was a gloomy period of mental suffering and bodily fatigue; of
unnatural restraint and painful probation.

The cold, authoritative manner of my uncle, at all times irksome and
repelling, after the death of his good wife became almost
insupportable; while the insolence and presumption of his artful son,
goaded a free and irascible spirit like mine almost to madness. The
moral force of his mother's character, though unappreciated by him, had
been some restraint upon his unamiable, tyrannical temper. That
restraint was now removed, and Theophilus considered that my dependent
situation gave him a lawful right to my services, and had I been a
workhouse apprentice in his father's house, he could not have given his
commands with an air of more pointed insolence. My obstinate resistance
to his authority, and my desperate struggles to emancipate myself from
his cont