I was an egg dropped on the sand; a pauper by nature, hunted from family to family, who belonged to nobody--and nobody cared for me.

I was despised from my birth, and denied the chance of obtaining a footing for myself in society.

Yes; I had not even the chance of being considered as a fellow-creature--yet all the people with whom I lived, brutalized as they were by the low cunning of trade, and the despicable shifts of poverty, were not without bowels, though they never yearned for me.

I was, in fact, born a slave, and chained by infamy to slavery during the whole of existence, without having any companions to alleviate it by sympathy, or teach me how to rise above it by their example.

But, to resume the thread of my tale-- "At sixteen, I suddenly grew tall, and something like comeliness appeared on a Sunday, when I had time to wash my face, and put on clean clothes.