cisions, as well as of my own. I drew from them new motives
to complacency. They fortified my perseverance in the path which I had
chosen as best; they raised me higher in my own esteem; they heightened
the claims of the reproachers themselves to my respect and my
gratitude.

They thought me slothful, incurious, destitute of knowledge and of all
thirst of knowledge, insolent, and profligate. They say that in the
treatment of my father I have been ungrateful and inhuman. I have stolen
his property, and deserted him in his calamity. Therefore they hate and
revile me. It is well; I love them for these proofs of their discernment
and integrity. Their indignation at wrong is the truest test of their
virtue.

It is true that they mistake me, but that arises from the circumstances
of our mutual situation. They examined what was exposed to their view,
they grasped at what was placed within their reach. To decide contrary
to appearances, to judge from what they knew not, would prove them to be
brutish and not rational, would make their decision of no worth, and
render them, in their turn, objects of neglect and contempt.

It is true that I hated school; that I sought occasions of absence, and
finally, on being struck by the master, determined to enter his presence
no more. I loved to leap, to run, to swim, to climb trees and to clamber
up rocks, to shroud myself in thickets and stroll among woods, to obey
the impulse of the moment, and to prate or be silent, just as my humour
prompted me. All this I loved more than to go to and fro in the same
path, and at stated hours to look off and on a book, to read just as
much and of such a kind, to stand up and be seated, just as another
thought proper to direct. I hated to be classed, cribbed, rebuked, and
feruled at the pleasure of one who, as it seemed to me, knew no guide in
his rewards but caprice, and no prompter in his punishments but passion.

It is true that I took up the spade and the hoe as rarely, and for as
short a time, as possible. I preferred to ramble in the forest and
loiter on the hill; perpetually to change the scene; to scrutinize the
endless variety of objects; to compare one leaf and pebble with another;
to pursue those trains of thought which their resemblances and
differences suggested; to inquire what it was that gave them this place,
structure, and form, were more agreeable employments than ploughing and
threshing.

My father could well afford to hire labou