ingrate to Destiny if I did not admit that nothing could have been more
happy than the circumstances with which I was surrounded at my birth--
the circumstances which made the boy, who made the youth, who made the
man.

Above all, I was fortunate in my father and my mother. Though I must put
them first in honour on my record, as first in time and in memory, I can
show them best by touching in a preliminary study on those surroundings,
moral and intellectual, into which I was born.

[Illustration: View of the North Front of Sutton Court, in the County of
Somerset, the Family House of the Stracheys.]

In the first place, I count myself specially happy in that my parents
were people of moderate fortune. They were not too poor to give me the
pleasures and the freedoms of a liberal education, and of all that used
to be included in the phrase "easy circumstances." Ours was a pleasant
and leisurely way of life, undisturbed by the major worries and
anxieties of narrow means.

On the other hand, my home surroundings were not of the pompous,
luxurious kind which makes nothing moral or physical matter very much,
which drowns a man in security. I knew what it was to want a thing, and
to be told that it was much too expensive to be thought of. I knew I
should have to make my way in life like my ancestors before me, for not
only was my family in no sense a rich one, but I was a second son, who
could only look forward to a second son's portion,--an honourable
distinction, this, and one of which my father and my mother were often
wont to speak.