The struggles of conscience through which I went in those days can be imagined by no one, and I can hardly realize them myself, except by recalling little incidents which show what the pressure must have been. I have mentioned an escapade of this period, connected with the last flogging my father gave me, but of which that was only the secondary cause, determining the moment but not the movement. It was a matter of conscience at bottom. My mother had, when I was about six years old, taken a little octoroon girl of three, the illegitimate daughter of a quadroon in our neighborhood, with the intention of bringing her up as a servant. The child was quick-witted and irrepressible, and disputes began between us as soon as she felt at home. I suppose she must have been inclined to impertinence, for she had to be whipped, and as at her age no difference of condition was evident to her, she became a severe trial to my equanimity. Every outbreak of temper induced by her conduct toward me became occasion of a period of penitence, for I was taught that such outbreaks were sinful, and as neither had I the amount of self-control that I needed to overlook the provocations she gave, nor had she the power of understanding the position, the transgressions that my conscience had to bear up under became an intolerable load. At this juncture came the brutal and as I felt most unmerited flogging of which I have told the story earlier: this precipitated a decision which had been slowly forming from my conscientious worries. I determined to go away from home, and seek a state of life in which I could maintain my spiritual tranquillity. I discussed the subject with a playmate of my age, the son of a gardener living near us, and, as his father had even a stronger propensity to the rod than mine, we sympathized on that ground and agreed to run away and work our passages on some ship to a land where we could live in a modified Robinson Crusoe manner,--not an uninhabited land, but one where we could earn, by fishing and similar devices, enough to live. I had been employed for a few months before in carrying to and fro the students' clothes for a washerwoman, one of the neighbors, and had earned three or four dollars which my mother had, as usual with any trifle I earned, put into the fund for the daily expenses. I do not know how it was with the older boys, but for me the rule was rigid--what I could earn was a part of the household income. I inwardly rebelled against this, but to no effect, so I never had any pocket-money. I submitted, as any son of my mother would have done at my age or have given a solid reason why not; but on this occasion, when money was indispensable to that expedition on which so much depended, I quietly reasserted my right to my earnings, and took the wages I had received, from the drawer where they were kept. My companion had no money at all, and thus my trifle had to pay for both as far as it would