p-mother's friends, who kept a slop-shop in
Wapping. I was represented (as it was said) in my true colours; but she,
'warranted,' snapping her fingers, 'that she should break my spirit or
heart.'

"My mother replied, with a whine, 'that if any body could make me
better, it was such a clever woman as herself; though, for her own part,
she had tried in vain; but good-nature was her fault.'

"I shudder with horror, when I recollect the treatment I had now to
endure. Not only under the lash of my task-mistress, but the drudge
of the maid, apprentices and children, I never had a taste of human
kindness to soften the rigour of perpetual labour. I had been introduced
as an object of abhorrence into the family; as a creature of whom my
step-mother, though she had been kind enough to let me live in the house
with her own child, could make nothing. I was described as a wretch,
whose nose must be kept to the grinding stone--and it was held there
with an iron grasp. It seemed indeed the privilege of their superior
nature to kick me about, like the dog or cat. If I were attentive, I
was called fawning, if refractory, an obstinate mule, and like a mule
I received their censure on my loaded back. Often has my mistress, for
some instance of forgetfulness, thrown me from one side of the kitchen
to the other, knocked my head against the wall, spit in my face, with
various refinements on barbarity that I forbear to enumerate, though
they were all acted over again by the servant, with additional insults,
to which the appellation of bastard, was commonly added, with taunts
or sneers. But I will not attempt to give you an adequate idea of my
situation, lest you, who probably have never been drenched with the
dregs of human misery, should think I exaggerate.

"I stole now, from absolute necessity,--bread; yet whatever else was
taken, which I had it not in my power to take, was ascribed to me. I was
the filching cat, the ravenous dog, the dumb brute, who must bear all;
for if I endeavoured to exculpate myself, I was silenced, without any
enquiries being made, with 'Hold your tongue, you never tell truth.'
Even the very air I breathed was tainted with scorn; for I was sent
to the neighbouring shops with Glutton, Liar, or Thief, written on my
forehead. This was, at first, the most bitter punishment; but sullen
pride, or a kind of stupid desperation, made me, at length, almost
regardless of the contempt, which had wrung from me so many solitary