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