“You will think, perhaps, that I acted rashly, and should have sought temporary assistance from friends before proceeding to such extremities. But the very few persons who might have been disposed to help me, I had long since neglected for the society of the well-dressed thieves by whom I had been so pitilessly fleeced. And had it been otherwise, I knew not how to beg or borrow. My practice had been in giving and lending. The first thing I did, when installed in my _sixième_ at twenty francs a-month, was to write to my uncle in England, informing him, without entering into details, of the knavery of which I had been victim, expressing my penitence for past follies, and my desire to atone them by a life of industry. I craved his advice as to the course I should adopt, declared a preference for the military profession, and entreated, as the greatest of favours, and the only one I should ever ask of him, that he would procure me a commission, either in the British service or Indian army. I got an answer by return of post, and, before opening it, augured well from such promptitude. Its contents bitterly disappointed me. My uncle’s agent informed me, by his employer’s command, that Mr Oakley, of Oakley Manor, was not disposed to take any notice of a nephew who had disgraced him by extravagance and evil courses, and that any future letters from me would be totally disregarded. I felt that I deserved this; but yet I had hoped kinder words from my dead father’s elder brother. The trifling assistance I asked would hardly have been missed out of his unencumbered income of ten thousand a-year. This was my first advertisement of the wide difference between relatives and friends. Gradually I gathered experience, paid for, in advance, at a heavy rate.