Why I
am thus watched I know not.
"My brother is my guardian, and nature and duty, it would seem, should
prompt him to guard my happiness as well as my interest; but I know in
the one instance he fails, and I fear in the other I am suffering. All
my family fear him, and none of them love me. I am my parents' youngest
child. Oh, sir! England is not the only country where it is a curse to
be a younger child. My father died when I was an infant. My mother was
affectionate and indulgent; my sisters were harsh and tyrannical, and
in very early girlhood taught me to hate them. My mother was made
miserable by their treatment of me; and my brother, too, quarrelled
with her because she would not subject me to the servility of the
discipline he prescribed. This quarrel ripened into hate, and he never
came to the house or spoke to my mother for years.
"The day before she died, and when her recovery was thought to be
impossible, he came with a prepared will and witnesses, which in their
presence he almost forced her to sign: in this will I was greatly
wronged, and this brother has tauntingly told me the cause of this was
my being the means of prejudicing our mother against him.
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