I obeyed him. Rising from the table, he took a few turns across the apartment; it seemed an exertion to regain composure; it was successful. He resumed his seat, emptied his glass to the bottom, and thus commenced, what was to me a narrative of perilous adventure, but all-engrossing interest. MY UNCLE’S STORY The career of vice is generally a simple history; a progressive advance from bad to worse, as the feelings deaden and the conscience, becomes seared and callous, by degrees. My earlier follies might have been easily arrested by parental intervention, but Mr. Clifford was reserved and proud; his displeasure was evinced by frigid mannerism, and his reproofs conveyed in the cold terms of general disapprobation. He never reasoned to the understanding--never appealed to the heart. I listened to him as I would to a lecture; and I came away without the slightest impression having been made upon an ardent disposition, which under better management might have been awakened and reclaimed. My ruin at last was consummated. I was discarded by my father; avoided by the good--deserted by the bad--and, finally, driven from the land, dishonoured and disgraced, where, by inheritance and birth, I should have held a proud position. Months had passed since I had been alienated from an angry father. The means by which I had managed, for a time, to obtain the sums of money my extravagance demanded, had been overtaxed, and consequently, my resources were completely exhausted. The woman who lured me on to crime and ruin had heartlessly abandoned me, and those who had plundered me of hundreds refused me a shilling to buy bread! For a whole day I had not tasted food, and for two nights no roof had sheltered me--and without any definite object in my wanderings, I had turned my steps to the home from which I had been long since rejected. I was ashamed to let any who had known me in the palmy days of youth witness the degradation that crime had caused; and, after night-fall, avoiding the village, I stole unperceived through a broken paling, and, like a thief and not the heir, entered the grounds of Clifford Hall.