It was not highly thought of by those who wished me well.

I remember being asked by two maiden ladies, about the time I left the university, what I was to be, and when I replied brazenly, 'An author,' they flung up their hands, and one exclaimed reproachfully, 'And you an M.A.!' My mother's views at first were not dissimilar; for long she took mine jestingly as something I would grow out of, and afterwards they hurt her so that I tried to give them up.

To be a minister--that she thought was among the fairest prospects, but she was a very ambitious woman, and sometimes she would add, half scared at her appetite, that there were ministers who had become professors, 'but it was not canny to think of such things.' I had one person only on my side, an old tailor, one of the fullest men I have known, and quite the best talker.

He was a bachelor (he told me all that is to be known about woman), a lean man, pallid of face, his legs drawn up when he walked as if he was ever carrying something in his lap; his walks were of the shortest, from the tea-pot on the hob to the board on which he stitched, from the board to the hob, and so to bed.

He might have gone out had the idea struck him, but in the years I knew him, the last of his brave life, I think he was only in the open twice, when he 'flitted'-- changed his room for another hard by.