No man likes to acknowledge that he has made a mistake in the choice of his profession, and every man, worthy¹ of the name, will row long against wind and tide before he allows himself to cry out, “I am baffled!” and submits to be floated passively back to land. From the first week of my residence in X—— I felt my occupation irksome. The thing itself — the work of copying and translating business-letters — was a dry and tedious task enough, but had that been all, I should long have borne with the nuisance; I am not of an impatient nature, and influenced by the double desire of getting my living and justifying² to myself and others the resolution I had taken to become a tradesman, I should have endured in silence the rust³ and cramp⁴ of my best faculties⁵; I should not have whispered, even inwardly, that I longed for liberty; I should have pent in every sigh by which my heart might have ventured to intimate its distress⁶ under the closeness, smoke, monotony and joyless tumult⁷ of Bigben Close, and its panting desire for freer and fresher scenes; I should have set up the image of Duty, the fetish of Perseverance⁸, in my small bedroom at Mrs. King’s lodgings⁹, and they two should have been my household gods, from which my darling, my cherished-in-secret, Imagination, the tender and the mighty¹⁰, should never, either by softness or strength, have severed¹¹ me. But this was not all; the

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