r. What my age and my
constitution enabled me to do could be done by a sturdy boy, in half the
time, with half the toil, and with none of the reluctance. The boy was a
bond-servant, and the cost of his clothing and food was next to nothing.
True it is, that my service would have saved him even this expense, but
my motives for declining the effort were not hastily weighed or
superficially examined. These were my motives.

My frame was delicate and feeble. Exposure to wet blasts and vertical
suns was sure to make me sick. My father was insensible to this
consequence; and no degree of diligence would please him but that which
would destroy my health. My health was dearer to my mother than to me.
She was more anxious to exempt me from possible injuries than reason
justified; but anxious she was, and I could not save her from anxiety
but by almost wholly abstaining from labour. I thought her peace of mind
was of some value, and that, if the inclination of either of my parents
must be gratified at the expense of the other, the preference was due to
the woman who bore me; who nursed me in disease; who watched over my
safety with incessant tenderness; whose life and whose peace were
involved in mine. I should have deemed myself brutish and obdurately
wicked to have loaded her with fears and cares merely to smooth the brow
of a froward old man, whose avarice called on me to sacrifice my ease
and my health, and who shifted to other shoulders the province of
sustaining me when sick, and of mourning for me when dead.

I likewise believed that it became me to reflect upon the influence of
my decision on my own happiness; and to weigh the profits flowing to my
father from my labour, against the benefits of mental exercise, the
pleasures of the woods and streams, healthful sensations, and the luxury
of musing. The pecuniary profit was petty and contemptible. It obviated
no necessity. It purchased no rational enjoyment. It merely provoked, by
furnishing the means of indulgence, an appetite from which my father was
not exempt. It cherished the seeds of depravity in him, and lessened the
little stock of happiness belonging to my mother.

I did not detain you long, my friends, in portraying my parents, and
recounting domestic incidents, when I first told you my story. What had
no connection with the history of Welbeck and with the part that I have
acted upon this stage I thought it proper to omit. My omission was
likewise prompted by ot