d
of two, and I lived neighbour to her in Suffolkshire. I can see
myself at fourteen and laugh at the picture. All of us have our
phases of comedy, our seasons when we are out of perspective and
approach the grotesque and furnish our own jesters for our after
lives.

At fourteen I was as ungainly a lad, with as helpless a sprawl of
legs and arms and as staring and shamefaced a surprise at my
suddenly realised height of growth, when jostled by a girl or a
younger lad, and utter discomfiture before an unexpected deepness of
tone when essaying a polite response to an inquiry of his elders, as
was ever seen in England. And I remember that I bore myself with a
wary outlook for affronts to my newly fledging dignity, and
concealed all that was stirring in me to new life, whether of
nobility or natural emotion, as if it were a dire shame, and
whenever I had it in my heart to be tender, was so brusque that I
seemed to have been provided by nature with an armour of roughness
like a hedgehog. But, perhaps, I had some small excuse for this,
though, after all, it is a question in my mind as to what excuse
there may be for any man outside the motives of his own deeds, and I
care not to dwell unduly, even to my own consideration, upon those
disadvantages of life which may come to a man without his cognisance
and are to be borne like any fortune of war. But I had a mother who
had small affection for me, and that was not so unnatural nor so
much to her discredit as it may sound, since she, poor thing, had
been forced into a marriage with my father when she was long in love
with her cousin. Then my father having died at sea the year after I
was born, and her cousin, who was a younger son, having come into
the estates through the deaths of both his brothers of small-pox in
one week, she married her first love in less than six months, and no
discredit to her, for women are weak when they love, and she had
doubtless been sorely tried. They told me that my poor father was a
true man and gallant soldier, and my old nurse used to talk to me of
him, and I used to go by myself to think of him, and my eyes would
get red when I was but a little boy with reflecting upon my mother
with her new husband and her beautiful little boy, my brother John,
a year younger than I, and how my own poor father was forgotten. But
there was no discredit to my mother, who was only a weak and gentle
woman and was tasting happiness after disappointment and sorrow, i