The next decade of my outer life is so uninteresting, even to myself,
that I will hurry through it as fast as I can. It will prove dull
reading, I fear.

[Illustration:]

My Uncle Ibbetson (as I now called him) took to me and arranged to
educate and start me in life, and make "a gentleman" of me--an "English
gentleman." But I had to change my name and adopt his; for some reason I
did not know, he seemed to hate my father's very name. Perhaps it was
because he had injured my father through life in many ways, and my
father had always forgiven him; a very good reason! Perhaps it was
because he had proposed to my mother three times when she was a girl,
and had been thrice refused! (After the third time, he went to India for
seven years, and just before his departure my father and mother were
married, and a year after that I was born.)

So Pierre Pasquier de la Mariere, _alias_ Monsieur Gogo, became Master
Peter Ibbetson, and went to Bluefriars, the gray-coat school, where he
spent six years--an important slice out of a man's life, especially
at that age.

I hated the garb, I hated the surroundings--the big hospital at the
back, and that reek of cruelty, drunkenness, and filth, the
cattle-market--where every other building was either a slaughter-house,
a gin-palace, or a pawnbroker's shop, more than all I hated the gloomy
jail opposite, where they sometimes hanged a man in public on a Monday
morning. This dismal prison haunted my dreams when I wanted to dream of