"One day he received a letter from his brother--I was but ten years old, but rendered old and careworn by suffering; I remember that I looked on him as he took it and exclaimed, 'From Uncle John! What have we here?' with a nervous tremour as to the passions the perusal of it might excite. He chuckled as he broke the seal--he fancied that he called him to his dying bed--'And that well over, you shall go to school, my fine fellow,' he cried; 'we shall have no more of your tricks at home.' He broke the seal, he read the letter. It announced his brother's marriage, and asked him to the wedding. I let fall the curtain over the scene that ensued: you would have thought that a villanous fraud had been committed, in which I was implicated. He drove me with blows from his door; I foamed with rage, and then I sat down and wept, and crept away to the fields, and wondered why I was born, and longed to kill my uncle, who was the cause to me of so much misery. "Everything changed for the worse now. Hitherto my father had lived on hope--now he despaired. He took to drinking, which exalted his passions and debased his reason. This at times gave me a superiority over him--when tipsy, I could escape his blows--which yet, when sober, fell on me with double severity. But even the respite I gained through his inebriety afforded me no consolation--I felt at once humbled and indignant at the shame so brought on us. I, child as I was, expostulated with him--I was knocked down, and kicked from the room. Oh, what a world this appeared to me! a war of the weak with the strong--and how I despised everything except victory. "Time wore on. My uncle's wife bore him in succession two girls. This was a respite. My father's spirits rose--but, fallen as he was, he could only celebrate his reawakened hopes by deeper potations and coarse jokes. The next offspring was a boy--he cost my father his life. Habits of drink had inflamed his blood--and his violence of temper made him nearly a maniac. On hearing of the birth of the heir, he drank to drown thought; wine was too slow a medicine; he quaffed deeply of brandy, and fell into a sleep, or rather torpor, from which he never after awoke. It was better so--he had spent everything--he was deeply in debt--he had lost all power of raising himself from the state of debasement into which he had fallen--the next day would have seen him in prison.