by expatiating
on domestic miseries, and by calling down that pity on my mother which I
knew would only have increased her distress.

The world regarded my deportment as insolent and perverse to a degree of
insanity. To deny my father an indulgence which they thought harmless,
and which, indeed, was harmless in its influence on other men; to
interfere thus publicly with his social enjoyments, and expose him to
mortification and shame, was loudly condemned; but my duty to my mother
debarred me from eluding this censure on the only terms on which it
could have been eluded. Now it has ceased to be necessary to conceal
what passed in domestic retirements, and I should willingly confess the
truth before any audience.

At first my father imagined that threats and blows would intimidate his
monitor. In this he was mistaken, and the detection of this mistake
impressed him with an involuntary reverence for me, which set bounds to
those excesses which disdained any other control. Hence I derived new
motives for cherishing a life which was useful, in so many ways, to my
mother.

My condition is now changed. I am no longer on that field to which the
law, as well as reason, must acknowledge that I had some right, while
there was any in my father. I must hazard my life, if need be, in the
pursuit of the means of honest subsistence. I never spared myself while
in the service of Mr. Hadwin; and, at a more inclement season, should
probably have incurred some hazard by my diligence.

These were the motives of my _idleness_,--for my abstaining from the
common toils of the farm passed by that name among my neighbours;
though, in truth, my time was far from being wholly unoccupied by manual
employments, but these required less exertion of body or mind, or were
more connected with intellectual efforts. They were pursued in the
seclusion of my chamber or the recesses of a wood. I did not labour to
conceal them, but neither was I anxious to attract notice. It was
sufficient that the censure of my neighbours was unmerited, to make me
regard it with indifference.

I sought not the society of persons of my own age, not from sullen or
unsociable habits, but merely because those around me were totally
unlike myself. Their tastes and occupations were incompatible with mine.
In my few books, in my pen, in the vegetable and animal existences
around me, I found companions who adapted their visits and intercourse
to my convenience and caprice, an