-The Courage of Childhood--The Girl
from the Workhouse--Witchcraft--The Dudley Devil--The
Deformed Methodist--A Child's idea of the Creator--The
Policeman--Sir Ernest Spencer's Donkey--The High Street Pork
Butcher.

My father was a printer and stationer, and would have been a bookseller
if there had been any book buyers in the region. There was a good deal
of unsaleable literary stock on the dusty shelves. I remember _The
Wealth of Nations_, Paley's _Evidences of Christianity, Locke on
the Human Understanding_, and a long row of the dramatists of the
seventeenth century. I burrowed into all these with zeal, and acquired
in very early childhood an omnivorous appetite for books which has never
left me.

There was a family legend, the rights and wrongs of which are long since
drowned in mist, to the effect that our little Staffordshire branch of
the great Murray family belonged to the elder and the higher, and the
titular rights of the Dukedom of Athol were held by a cadet of the
house. My father's elder brother, Adam Goudie Murray, professed to hold
this belief stoutly, and he and the reigning duke of a century ago had
a humorous spar with each other about it on occasion. "I presume your
Grace is still living in my hoose," Adam would say.

"Ay, I'm still there, Adam," the duke would answer, and the jest was
kept up until the old nobleman died. Sir Bernard Burke knew of the
story, but when as a matter of curiosity I broached the question to him,
he said there were too many broken links in the chain of evidence to
make it worth investigation. My father had, or humorously affected, a
sort of faith in it, and used to say that we were princes in disguise.
The disguise was certainly complete, for the struggle for life was
severe and constant, but there was enough in the vague rumour to excite
the imagination of a child, and I know that I built a thousand airy
day-dreams on it.

To me the most momentous episodes of life appear to resolve themselves
naturally into first occasions. Those times at which we first
feel, think, act, or experience in any given way, form the true
stepping-stones of life. Memory is one of the most capricious of the
faculties. There is a well-known philosophical theory to the effect that
nothing is actually forgotten or forgetable which has once imprinted
itself upon the mind. But, bar myself, I do not remember to have
encountered anybody who professed to recall his very earliest