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t random, take some account of my past life, more than ever I spoke to anyone. After the fire, when I was seventeen years old, I was left alone with my mother, and lived easy for one year, having most necessaries, though few diversions, and never going abroad. Yet after working all day I read some pleasant book at night, and was contented enough; but after we were gotten into our house, and all the family were settled, in about a year's time I began to find out that we were ruined. Then came on London journeys, Convocations of blessed memory, that for seven years my father was at London, and we at home in intolerable want and affliction. Then I learnt what it was to seek money for bread, seldom having any without such hardships in getting it that much abated the pleasure of it. Thus we went on, growing worse and worse; all us children in scandalous want of necessaries for years together; vast income, but no comfort or credit with it. Then I went to London with design to get into some service, failed of that, and grew acquainted with Leybourne. Ever after that I lived in close correspondence with him. When anything grieved me, he was my comforter; and what though our affairs grew no better, yet I was tolerably easy, thinking his love sufficient recompense for the absence of all other worldly comforts. Then ill fate, in the shape of a near relation, laid the groundwork of my misery, and--joined with my mother's command and my own indiscretion-broke the correspondence between him and I [_sic_]. That dismal winter I shall ever remember; my mother was sick, confined even to her bed, my father in danger of arrests every day. I had a large family to keep, and a small sum to keep it on; and yet in all this care the loss of Leybourne was heaviest. For nearly half a year I never slept half a night, and now, provoked at all my relations, resolved never to marry. Wishing to be out of their sight, I began first to think of going into the world. A vacancy happening in Lincoln boarding school, I went thither; and though I had never so much as seen one before, I fell readily into that way of life; and I was so pleased to see myself in good clothes, with money in my pocket, and respected in a strange manner by everyone, that I seemed got
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