memory. But as a pupil I was always most inapt and grievous, in dates
and in matters mathematical especially; so that I gave her
inexhaustible patience many a sad hour. To this day I cannot tell in
what year was fought the battle of Marathon, or when John signed Magna
Charta; though the battle itself, and the scene of the barons with
menacing brows gathered about John, stood clearly pictured in my
imagination. Dates were arbitrary, and to my memory nothing arbitrary
would stick. Nevertheless, when I am myself constructing a narrative,
whether it be true or fictitious, I am wedded to dates, and cannot be
divorced from them. It must be set down precisely when the events took
place, in what years the dramatis personae were born, and how old they
were when each juncture of their fortunes came to pass. I can no more
dispense with dates than I can talk without consonants; they carry
form, order, and credibility. Or they are like the skeleton which
gives recognizable shape to men and animals. Nothing mortal can get on
without them..

Whether this addiction be in the nature of a reaction from my childish
perversity, giving my erudite and beloved aunt Lizzie (as I called
her) her revenge so long after our lessons are over; or how else to
explain it, I know not; but it leads me to affirm here that the nadir
of my father's material fortunes was reached about the year 1849. At
that time his age was five-and-forty, and I was three.

The causes of this financial depression were several. One morning he
awoke to find himself deprived, by political chicanery, of the income
of a custom-house surveyorship which for some while past had served to
support his small family. Now, some men could have gone on writing
stories in the intervals between surveying customs, and have thus
placed an anchor to windward against the time when the political storm