With Her Died All That Made Home Attractive, For My
Father Was Harsh, As I Have Before Said, And Had Never Treated Me With
Kindness.
Not that he exerted any unusual severity towards me, but it
was his way.
I do not complain of him. In fact, I have never been of a
complaining disposition. I seem born to be buffeted by friends and
fortune, and nature has made me a careless endurer of buffetings.
I now, however, began to grow very impatient of remaining at school, to
be flogged for things that I did not like. I longed for variety,
especially now that I had not my uncle's to resort to, by way of
diversifying the dullness of school with the dreariness of his country
seat. I was now turned of sixteen; tall for my age, and full of idle
fancies. I had a roving, inextinguishable desire to see different kinds
of life, and different orders of society; and this vagrant humor had
been fostered in me by Tom Dribble, the prime wag and great genius of
the school, who had all the rambling propensities of a poet.
I used to set at my desk in the school, on a fine summer's day, and
instead of studying the book which lay open before me, my eye was
gazing through the window on the green fields and blue hills. How I
envied the happy groups seated on the tops of stage-coaches, chatting,
and joking, and laughing, as they were whirled by the school-house, on
their way to the metropolis.
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