happened fifty years ago is very clear and bright, and the little
incidents of my boyhood are more to me, because they touch me more
nearly, than such great matters as the late rebellion against His
Majesty King George, whom God preserve.

Especially does my thought run back to a day, fifty-six years ago
this very summer, when by mere chance, as it would appear to men's
eyes, my fortunes became linked with those of Joe Punchard, who is
now at this moment, I warrant, smoking his pipe in the lodge at my
park gates. I was eleven years old, a thin slip of a boy, small for
my age, and giving no promise, to be sure, of my present stature
and girth. The neighbors shook their heads sometimes as they looked
at me, and wondered why Mr. John Ellery, if he must adopt a boy--a
strange thing, they thought, for a bachelor to do--did not choose
one of a sturdier make than poor little Humphrey Bold. They even
joked about my name, averring that names assuredly must go by
contraries, for I was Bold by name, and timid by nature. The joke
seemed to me, even then, a very poor one, for a boy must have the
name he is born with, and I have known very delicate and
white-handed folk of the name of Smith.

Mr. Ellery, a bachelor, as I have said, adopted me when my own
father and mother died, which happened when I was still an infant
and, mercifully, too young to understand my loss. My father, as I
called him, was a substantial yeoman whose farm and holding lay
some three miles on the English side of Shrewsbury. He was well on
in years when he adopted me, and dwells in my memory as a strong,
silent man who, when his day's work was done, would sit in the
inglenook with a book upon his knees. This taste for reading marked
him out from the neighboring farmers, with whom, indeed, he had