ABSTRACT
It has sufficiently appeared that my situation was a solitary one, while Hilkiah lived: what did it become when my venerable preceptor was no more? If freedom could make happiness, I was free. My uncle was a mere cypher in the economy of his own household. Having already reached the twelfth year of my age, and being considered as the immediate heir to the Mandeville estate, none of the servants had the boldness to control me in my caprices. Happily those caprices were neither violent nor adventurous. Still more happily for me, this period of my interregnum / was short. What effect would have been produced, if the interval in which I was my own master had been protracted, I can scarcely venture to say. I shut my books. This had been the case during the short season of Hilkiah’s mortal sickness. But then my thoughts were much occupied with his precarious state, and the melancholy catastrophe that seemed to impend. When that was decided, and still more when the remains of my preceptor had been finally carried forth from the mansion in which he had enacted so considerable a personage, I felt that I was entering on a new epoch. The apartment in which we had sat together, was now entirely mine. The easy chair, in which in his character of my pedagogue he had delighted to repose himself, was vacant.
