That he was lucky in opening his eyes, even though in an humble cottage, amidst the scenes that nature spread around him, is certain enough. To be born poor as the spirit of poverty herself, is sufficiently bad; but far worse is it to be thus born in the bottom of some noisome alley of a vast town, where a single ray of sunlight never falls, nor a glimpse of the sky itself is ever caught, beyond what may be afforded by that small dusky section of it which seems to lie like a dirty ceiling on the chimney-tops, and even then cannot be seen, unless (to speak like a geometrician) by raising the face to a horizontal position and the eyes perpendicularly. Fresh air, fields, rivers, clouds, and sunshine, redeem half the miseries of want, and make a happy joyful being of him who, in any other sense, cannot call one single atom of the world his own. Colin Clink was a native of the village of Bramleigh, about twenty miles west of that city of law and divinity, of sermons and proctors' parchment, the silent city of York. Some time previous to his birth, his mother had taken a fancy, suggested, very probably, by the powerful pleading of a weak pocket, or, with equal probability, by something else to the full as argumentative, to reside in a small cottage, (as rural landowners are in the habit of terming such residences, though they are known to everybody else as hovels,) altogether by herself; if I except a little girl, of some five or six years of age, who accompanied her in the capacity of embryo housemaid, gruel-maker, and, when strong enough, of nurse to the expected “little stranger.” For the discharge of the more important and pressing duties incident to her situation, she depended upon one or two of those permanently unemployed old crones, usually to be found in country places, who pass the greater portion of their time in “preserving” themselves, like red herrings or hung beef, over the idle smoke of their own scanty fires, and who, as they are always waiting chances, may be had by asking for at any moment. Their minimum of wages depended upon a small sum of money derived by Mistress Clink, the mother of our hero, from a source which, as she then followed no particular employment, we are compelled to pronounce obscure.