Page:The Ladies' Cabinet of Fashion, Music & Romance 1832.pdf/125

Rh "THE MERCHANT'S CLERK.

A TALE OF THE SEA.

(Concluded from p. 54.)

" I was born,' said the unhappy man whom we had taken from the wreck, " in a small village, on the banks ofthe Clyde, and being an only child, received from infancy more indulgence than would otherwise have fallen to my lot. My parents were in middling circumstances only, but well educated, and genteel, and enabled, in a place where none were rich, and all the necessaries of life were cheap and abundant, to maintain a very respectable establishment. I grew up under my mother's eye, a wild, reckless, and spoiled child. I was fond of books notwithstanding, and being a youth of some genius, advanced rapidly in my studies, with but little exertion ; and it often astonished my teacher, that one whose time appeared wholly devoted to mischief and play, should maintain the head of his class, despite the exertions for superiority on the part of his more plodding and studious, though less talented associates. As I grew up, unchecked by my parents, my passion for mischief increased, and the sober villagers, who were frequent sufferers from my pranks, remarked, with a prophetic shrug, that young Reynolds would certainly come to the gallows at last, in case the penitentiary did not prevent the sad catastrophe. My heart was not naturally a bad one, and my faults arose rather from the too great licence yielded them by over-indulgent parents, than from any innate disposition to crime. Constant intercourse with a couple of medical students, whom our village practitioner was educating, gave me a taste for that calling ; and when urged by my father to embrace the study of one of the learned professions, I selected that of medicine, being_not a little inclined thereto by the idle life my associates appeared to lead, and the prospect of passing a winter in London. I had been upward of two years a student, and had already drank deeply from the cup of sensual pleasure, while attending a winter's course of lectures in the city ; and had returned home deeply skilled in vice and dissipation, when a change suddenly came over my spirit, and a total alteration was wrought in my habits and morals.

" The father of the girl whom you saw on board the ship, a wealthy merchant in the city, was unexpectedly much reduced in circumstances by the villany of a pretended friend, for whom he had largely endorsed ; and becoming disgusted with the