Arminius Vambery, His Life and Adventures

When my father died in 1832 I was but a few months old. My mother was poor, very poor indeed. By marrying again, however, she fondly hoped she might be enabled to give her helpless and fatherless orphans a better bringing up. But in this expectation she was sadly mistaken. Our stepfather, although a very excellent man, did but very little towards relieving the pressing needs of our small household. In due time, too, our family circle got fresh additions; the number of the little ones who stood in need of food and clothing was increasing. The consequence was that our parents, in their solicitude for the welfare of the smaller children, turned the older ones adrift to seek the best way they could their own livelihood as soon as they were supposed to have attained an age ripe enough to take care of themselves. My turn came when twelve years old. My mother then thought I had reached a period of my life when I ought to look after myself. Although I had been afflicted since my birth with a lameness from which I began to suffer when three years old, and which compelled me to carry a crutch under my left arm up to the time my mother declared me to be of mature age, I was yet, on the whole, a tolerably hearty and healthy boy. The simple fare, often barely sufficient to still the cravings of hunger, the exceedingly scanty clothing allowed to me, and my want of familiarity with even the meanest comforts of life had, already, at this early stage of my life, hardened my body, and inured it to the most adverse climatic conditions. I had then been attending school for about three years; and as my teachers were lavish in their praises of my extraordinary memory, enabling me to learn by heart, with great ease, almost anything, even passages in Latin which I did not understand at all, I thought of going on with the pursuit of my studies, in order to become a physician or lawyer,—the two professions which, at that time, were considered in the rural parts of Hungary as the goal of the most exalted ambition of an educated man. My mother, too, had some such future in view for me, but inexorable poverty stood in the way of all such ambitious schemings. I had to stoop lower, much lower indeed. I was apprenticed to a ladies' dressmaker. When I had got so far as to be able to stitch two pieces of muslin together, a feeling overcame me that Dame Fortune had something better in store for me than stitching away all my life long. I soon left the shop of the ladies' dress artist, and was engaged by the inn-keeper of the village to be the private teacher of his only son. I was to initiate him into the mystery of reading, writing and arithmetic. But my duties did not end there; I had to perform, besides, such unusual offices as the cleaning of the boots of the family on Saturday evenings, and occasionally waiting on thirsty guests, and handing them a glass of wine or whiskey.