CHAPTER II


Barracks and lodgings--A camp--The viper--A delicate child--Blackberry
time--_Meun_ and _tuum_--Hythe--The Golgotha--Daneman's skull--Superhuman
stature--Stirring times--The sea-bord.

I have been a wanderer the greater part of my life; indeed I remember
only two periods, and these by no means lengthy, when I was, strictly
speaking, stationary. I was a soldier's son, and as the means of my
father were by no means sufficient to support two establishments, his
family invariably attended him wherever he went, so that from my infancy
I was accustomed to travelling and wandering, and looked upon a monthly
change of scene and residence as a matter of course. Sometimes we lived
in barracks, sometimes in lodgings, but generally in the former, always
eschewing the latter from motives of economy, save when the barracks were
inconvenient and uncomfortable; and they must have been highly so indeed,
to have discouraged us from entering them; for though we were gentry
(pray bear that in mind, gentle reader), gentry by birth, and
incontestably so by my father's bearing the commission of good old George
the Third, we were not _fine gentry_, but people who could put up with as
much as any genteel Scotch family who find it convenient to live on a
third floor in London, or on a sixth at Edinburgh or Glasgow. It was not
a little that could discourage us: we once lived within the canvas walls
of a camp, at a place called Pett, in Sussex; and I believe it was at
this place that occurred the first circumstance, or adventure, call it
which you will, that I can remember in connection with myself: it was a
strange one, and I will relate it.