CHAPTER VI.
THE SORROWS OF DEPENDENCE.
My heart sickens over this dreary portion of my life.

I have heard childhood called the happiest season of life.

To me it had few joys.

It was a gloomy period of mental suffering and bodily fatigue; of unnatural restraint and painful probation.
The cold, authoritative manner of my uncle, at all times irksome and repelling, after the death of his good wife became almost insupportable; while the insolence and presumption of his artful son, goaded a free and irascible spirit like mine almost to madness.

The moral force of his mother's character, though unappreciated by him, had been some restraint upon his unamiable, tyrannical temper.