I. THE EVENTS OF THIRTY YEARS

1. DECEMBER AND JANUARY, 1835-36

In the long and intricately inwrought chain of circumstance which
renders worthy of record some experiences of Cytherea Graye, Edward
Springrove, and others, the first event directly influencing the
issue was a Christmas visit.

In the above-mentioned year, 1835, Ambrose Graye, a young architect
who had just begun the practice of his profession in the midland
town of Hocbridge, to the north of Christminster, went to London to
spend the Christmas holidays with a friend who lived in Bloomsbury.
They had gone up to Cambridge in the same year, and, after
graduating together, Huntway, the friend, had taken orders.

Graye was handsome, frank, and gentle. He had a quality of thought
which, exercised on homeliness, was humour; on nature,
picturesqueness; on abstractions, poetry. Being, as a rule,
broadcast, it was all three.

Of the wickedness of the world he was too forgetful. To discover
evil in a new friend is to most people only an additional
experience: to him it was ever a surprise.

While in London he became acquainted with a retired officer in the
Navy named Bradleigh, who, with his wife and their daughter, lived