At the time of my birth, then, and until his death, my father was a civic official in a responsible position, being a collector of outstanding accounts for the Consolidated Water Board. In addition, he was one of the most respected and trustworthy agents of the Durham and West Hartlepool Fire and Burglary Insurance Company, a sidesman of the Church of St. James-the-Less in Camberwell, and the tenant of Mon Repos, Angela Gardens. This was one of some thirty-six admirably conceived houses of a similar and richly ornamented architecture, the front door of each being flanked and surmounted by diamond-shaped panes of blue and vermilion glass; and though it was true that this particular house had been named by the landlord in a foreign tongue, it must not be assumed that this nomenclature in any way met with my father’s approval. On the contrary, he had not only protested, but such was his distrust of French morality that he had always insisted, both for himself and others, upon a strictly English pronunciation. Somewhat under lower middle height, my father, even as a boy, had been inclined to corpulence, a characteristic, inherited by myself, that he succeeded in retaining to the end of his life. Nor did he ever lose—or not to any marked extent—either the abundant hair that grew upon his scalp, his glossy and luxurious moustache, or his extraordinarily powerful voice. This was a deep bass that in moments of emotion became suddenly converted into a high falsetto, and he never hesitated, in a cause that he deemed righteous, to employ it to its full capacity. Always highly coloured, and the fortunate possessor of an exceptionally large and well-modelled nose, my father’s eyes were of a singularly pale, unwinking blue, while in his massive ears, with their boldly outstanding rims, resided the rare faculty of independent motion. My mother, on the other hand, presented hardly a feature that could, in the strictest sense, have been called beautiful, although she was somewhat taller than my father, with eyes that were similar in their shade of blue. Like my father’s, too, her nose was large, but it had been built on lines that were altogether weaker, and the slightly reddish down upon her upper lip might even by some people have been considered a disfigurement. She had inherited, however, together with five hundred pounds, an apparently gentle disposition, and was a scion or scioness of the Walworth Road branch of the great family of Robinson. Herself the eldest of the nine daughters of Mortimer Robinson, a well-known provision merchant, my father had claimed relationship for her, albeit unsuccessfully, with Peter Robinson of Oxford Street, while he used half humorously to assert her connection with the fictional character known as Robinson Crusoe. Clean in her habits, quiet about the house, and invariably obedient to his slightest wish, he had very seldom indeed, as he often told me, seriously regretted his choice of a wife.