twenty-eighth, 1865. He might have been born on February twenty-ninth
one year earlier, and that would have been little short of a
catastrophe, for in that case his birthdays would have been separated
by intervals of four years, and every boy knows what a hardship it
would be to wait four years for a birthday, when every one else is
having one every year. There _are_ people, to be sure, who would like
their birthdays to be four years apart, but they are not boys.

Grenfell was also lucky, or, let us say, fortunate in the place where
he was born and spent his early boyhood. His father was Head Master of
Mostyn House, a school for boys at Parkgate, England, a little
fishing village not far from the historic old city of Chester. By
referring to your map you will find Chester a dozen miles or so to the
southward of Liverpool, though you may not find Parkgate, for it is so
small a village that the map makers are quite likely to overlook it.

Here at Parkgate the River Dee flows down into an estuary that opens
out into the Irish Sea, and here spread the famous "Sands of Dee,"
known the world over through Charles Kingsley's pathetic poem, which
we have all read, and over which, I confess, I shed tears when a boy:

O Mary, go and call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
Across the Sands o' Dee;
The western wind was wild and dank wi' foam,
And all alone went she.

The creeping tide came up along the sand,
And o'er and o'er the sand,