 creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant; but I knew
that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides,
endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the
same nature as man. I was more agile than they, and could subsist upon coarser
diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my
stature far exceeded theirs. When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like
me. Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and
whom all men disowned?
    I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me:
I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had
for ever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of
hunger, thirst, and heat!
    Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has
once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to shake off
all thought and feeling; but I learned that there was but one means to overcome
the sensation of pain, and that was death - a state which I feared yet did not
understand. I admired virtue and good feelings, and loved the gentle manners and
amiable qualities of my cottagers; but I was shut out from intercourse with
them, except through means which I obtained by stealth, when I was unseen and
unknown, and which rather increased than satisfied the desire I had of becoming
one among my fellows. The gentle words of Agatha, and the animated smiles of the
charming Arabian, were not for me. The mild exhortations of the old man, and the
lively conversation of the loved Felix, were not for me. Miserable, unhappy
wretch!
    Other lessons were impressed upon me even more deeply. I heard of the
difference of sexes; and the birth and growth of children; how the father doated
on the smiles of the infant, and the lively sallies of the older child; how all
the life and cares of the mother were wrapped up in the precious charge; how the
mind of youth expanded and gained knowledge; of brother, sister, and all the
various relationships which bind one human being to another in mutual bonds.
    But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant
days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my
past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing
