"The means which he employed to effect this wondrous revolution in my opinions and in my heart were very simple, but they were effectual: he chose to let me see and feel that the work was his own work. Such was the restlessness of my mind, that I was compelled to keep perpetually moving about, that by seeing various sights, and going into fresh society, I might be diverted from the gloomy terror of my own thoughts, and the dread of what was to come. I spent two years on the continent, but returned to England last spring the same man as when I left it--with this difference, that I seemed nearer the verge of absolute despair. After spending a few weeks in London, and visiting many places in South Wales, I went to Bristol, and then to Bath, and from Bath to Ryde, in the Isle of Wight, where I took lodgings, making up my mind to stay there during the summer. When returning one evening from Newport, I met a lad with a small basket, who asked me to buy a little book, telling me, as an inducement, that he had been walking about all day long, and had not got enough money to buy a supper for his poor old mother. His doleful tale touched my heart, and I gave him some relief, but said, 'Keep your books, lad, they may be money to you.' We both passed on, but when at some distance from each other, I thought, perhaps he has in his basket something that would amuse me. I turned and hailed him, and he ran back. On examining his basket I found a largish lot of religious tracts; I took two, paid him for them, put them into my pocket, and went home. I was so knocked up by my long walk that I was soon in bed and asleep, and the tracts were not thought of. The next evening, when sitting on a large stone on the beach, looking at the ships sailing and at anchor, at the varied movements of the sea-gulls, and the gentle ebbing of the tide, I felt a momentary elation of spirit, such as I had not felt for years; it was something like the sudden return of an old friend after years of absence. I will not, Sir, trouble you by recounting the thoughts that passed through my mind in this elysian reverie, but one thought came and went so often, that it became the master thought of this delightful mood of thinking. 'Yes,' thought I, 'man has a capacity for happiness, why, then, is he not happy? Why am _I_ not happy? and why do I not enjoy life when I possess so amply the means of enjoying it? What can be the reason why I am so cast down and wretched?' On putting my hand into my pocket to get my knife, I felt the tracts I had put there when I bought them, and I took them out. Their titles, _Covey_[4] and _Poor Joseph_, had caught my eye when I saw them in the lad's basket, and I was induced to select them, imagining they narrated some interesting tale. [4] See note, p. 58.