ave lived in it, who had cared
to have a cheerful home, I might almost have said, a respectable one, I
fancy ours was nearly the only house in the block occupied by its owner;
the others, equally large, were rented for tenement houses, or
boarding-houses, and perhaps for many things worse. It was probably
owing to this fact, that my uncle gave orders, once for all, I was never
to go into the street alone; and I believe, in my whole life, I had
never taken a walk unaccompanied by a servant, or one of my teachers.

A very dull life indeed. I wonder how I endured it. The rooms were so
dismal, the windows so uneventful. If it had not been for a room in the
garret where I had my playthings, and where the sun came all day long, I
am sure I should have been a much worse and more unhappy child. As I
grew older, I tried to adorn my room (my own respectable sleeping room,
I mean), with engravings, and the little ornaments that I could buy. But
it was a hopeless attempt. The walls were so high and so dingy, the
little pictures were lost upon them; and the vases on the great black
mantel-shelf looked so insignificant, I felt ashamed of them, and owned
the unfitness of decorating such a room. No flowers would grow in those
cold north windows--no bird would sing in sight of such a street. I gave
it up with a sigh; and there was one good instinct lost.

When I was about eleven, I fell foul of some good books. If it had not
been for them, I truly do not see how I could have known that I was not
to lie or steal, and that God was to be worshipped. Certainly, I had had
hands slapped many times for taking things I had been forbidden to
touch, and had had many a battle in consequence of "telling stories,"
with the servants of the house, but I had always recognized the personal
spite of the punishments, and they had not carried with them any
moral lesson.

I had sometimes gone to church; but the sermons in large city churches
are not generally elementary, and I did not understand those that I
heard at all. Occasionally I went with the nurse to Vespers, and that I
thought delightful. I was enraptured with the pictures, the music, the
rich clothes of the priests; if it had not been for the bad odor of the
neighboring worshippers, I think I might have rushed into the bosom of
the Church of Rome. But that offended sense restrained me. And so, as I
said, if I had not obtained access to some books of holy and pure
influence, and been starved by