g me treated with contempt, and always being fed and dressed
better, my sister conceived a contemptuous opinion of me, that proved an
obstacle to all affection; and my father, hearing continually of my
faults, began to consider me as a curse entailed on him for his sins: he
was therefore easily prevailed on to bind me apprentice to one of my
step-mother's friends, who kept a slop-shop in Wapping. I was represented
(as it was said) in my true colours; but she, 'warranted,' snapping her
fingers, 'that she should break my spirit or heart.'

"My mother replied, with a whine, 'that if any body could make me better,
it was such a clever woman as herself; though, for her own part, she had
tried in vain; but good-nature was her fault.'

"I shudder with horror, when I recollect the treatment I had now to
endure. Not only under the lash of my task-mistress, but the drudge of
the maid, apprentices and children, I never had a taste of human kindness
to soften the rigour of perpetual labour. I had been introduced as an
object of abhorrence into the family; as a creature of whom my
step-mother, though she had been kind enough to let me live in the house
with her own child, could make nothing. I was described as a wretch,
whose nose must be kept to the grinding stone--and it was held there with
an iron grasp. It seemed indeed the privilege of their superior nature to
kick me about, like the dog or cat. If I were attentive, I was called
fawning, if refractory, an obstinate mule, and like a mule I received
their censure on my loaded back. Often has my mistress, for some
instance of forgetfulness, thrown me from one side of the kitchen to the
other, knocked my head against the wall, spit in my face, with various
refinements on barbarity that I forbear to enumerate, though they were
all acted over again by the servant, with additional insults, to which
the appellation of _bastard_, was commonly added, with taunts or sneers.
But I will not attempt to give you an adequate idea of my situation, lest
you, who probably have never been drenched with the dregs of human
misery, should think I exaggerate.

"I stole now, from absolute necessity,--bread; yet whatever else was
taken, which I had it not in my power to take, was ascribed to me. I was
the filching cat, the ravenous dog, the dumb brute, who must bear all;
for if I endeavoured to exculpate myself, I was silenced, without any
enquiries being made, with 'Hold your tongue, you never tell tr