got into a low way of going to jail instead of getting hanged.

It is not well; when writing an autobiography, to follow your ancestry
down too close to your own time--it is safest to speak only vaguely of
your great-grandfather, and then skip from there to yourself, which I now
do.

I was born without teeth--and there Richard III had the advantage of me;
but I was born without a humpback, likewise, and there I had the
advantage of him. My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuously
honest.

But now a thought occurs to me. My own history would really seem so tame
contrasted with that of my ancestors, that it is simply wisdom to leave
it unwritten until I am hanged. If some other biographies I have read
had stopped with the ancestry until a like event occurred, it would have
been a felicitous thing, for the reading public. How does it strike you?







AWFUL, TERRIBLE
MEDIEVAL ROMANCE

CHAPTER I

THE SECRET REVEALED.