have muttered: "Damned good! I don't know how the devil I ever managed
to write 'em."

The tale of how I came to _The Spectator_ is finished. I must now
describe what sort of a youth it was who got there, and what were the
influences that had gone to his making.




CHAPTER III

MY PHYSICAL HOME, MY FAMILY, AND MY GOOD FORTUNE THEREIN


The autobiographer, or at any rate the writer of the type of
autobiography on which I am engaged, need not apologise for being
egotistical. If he is not that he is nothing. He must start with the
assumption that people want to hear about him and to hear it from
himself. Further, he must be genuinely and actively interested in his
own life and therefore write about it willingly and with zest. If you
get anywhere near the position of an autobiographer, "_invitus_,"
addressing a reader, "_invitum_," the game is up.

It would, then, be an absurdity to pretend to avoid egotism.

It would be almost as futile to apologise for being trivial. All details
of human life are interesting, or can be made interesting, especially if
they can be shown to be contributory to the development of the subject
on the Anatomy-table. The elements that contributed to the building up