Finally, another aunt came to visit us from Liverpool; and, therewith, the first phase of my future was shaped. When she had gathered the intentions of her sister towards me, she ventured upon the confident statement that her husband--Uncle Tom, as he came to be known to me--was able to launch me upon a career which would lead to affluence and honour. He had such great influence with a Mr. Winter--Manager of a Liverpool Insurance Office--that my future was assured. After several debates between the two sisters, Aunt Mary was persuaded that I had but to land in Liverpool to be permanently established in a highly-prosperous business. After Aunt Maria’s departure, a letter from her husband arrived which substantiated all she had said, and urged the necessity of an early decision, as such a vacancy could not be left long unfilled. It only needed this to hurry Aunt Mary in procuring for me the proper outfit, which she was resolved should be as complete as if it were for one of her own children. When the day of departure at last came, my feelings were violently wrenched; certainly some fibres of my affection were being torn, else why that feeling of awful desolation? It may appear odd that I wept copiously at leaving Ffynnon Beuno, where there were none who could have wept for me, had they tried ever so hard. Nevertheless, when one image after the other of the snug farm-house and lovely neighbourhood, the Craig Fawr, the fields, the woods, the caves, the brook, crowded into my mind, I was sorely tempted to pray for a little delay. It is probably well that I did not, and it was better for my health that my affections were with inanimate nature and not with persons, for, otherwise, it would have been a calamity. Wordsworth finely describes the feeling that moved me in the lines,-- ‘These hills, Which were his living being, even more Than his own blood ... had laid Strong hold upon his affections, were to him A pleasurable feeling of blind love.’ As the little packet-steamer bore us towards Liverpool, and the shores of Wales receded from view, the sight of the melancholy sea and cold sky seemed in fit sympathy with the heavy burden which lay on my heart. They stirred up such oppressive fancies that I regarded myself as the most miserable being in existence, deprived of even a right to love the land that I was born in. I said to myself, ‘I have done no harm to any living soul, yet if I but get attached to a field, all conspire to tear me away from it, and send me wandering like a vagabond over the unknown.’