I know not what other persons may have felt on these occasions; but I must own, that, in spite of all my enthusiasm, when the actual time came for fairly leaving friends and home, and plunging quite alone and irrevocably into a new life, I felt a degree of anxiety, and distrust of myself, which, as these feelings were quite strange, I scarcely knew how to manage. I had been allowed to choose my own profession, it is true, and was always eager to be off; yet I almost wished, when the actual moment arrived, that I had not been taken at my word. For the first time in my life, I knew what was meant by the word responsibility, and all the shame of failure stared me in the face. When at school, nine-tenths of my thoughts had always rambled abroad, to those unknown regions, upon which my imagination loved to feast, day and night. Still, I can well remember, my heart sunk within me, and I felt pretty much as if I were on the verge of death, when the carriage that was to convey me away, drove up to the door. I still believed that there was, even on this earth, a new and a much better world before me; but when I tasked my judgment, to say upon what grounds this belief rested, the answer was so meagre, that I began to dread I had done a mighty foolish thing in setting out to seek for it. “What a scrape I shall be in,” I said to myself, “if the gloomy representations of these sad fellows the poets be true pictures of life! What if this existence of ours be but a scene of gradually-increasing misery! How shall I be able to get on at all, if a sea life be not more enjoyable than that of the High School of Edinburgh? and what kind of figure shall I cut, when driven back, by sheer distress, to petition my father to take me home again, to eat the bitter bread of idleness, or to seek for some other profession, wherein all the rubs and tugs may prove just as bad as those of the sea, and possibly not very much better than those of school?”