CHAPTER XXIII. Our Waste Basket--Contemporaneous Records and Memoranda of Interesting Cases, Miss Ruff's Tribulations, Astounding Degradation, Fall of a Youthful, Beautiful and Accomplished Wife, A French Beauty's Troubles, Life on the Boston Boats, An Eighty-year-old "Fence," Shoppers' Perils, AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL It is to be presumed that the readers of this book will expect a few words on a subject "on which," as Lord Byron somewhere remarks, "all men are supposed to be fluent and none agreeable--self." However much the inclination and, I might add, temptation may run in the direction of fluency and diffuseness in this case, my utterance shall be as brief as possible. I, William F. Howe, founder of the law firm of Howe & Hummel, was born in Shawmut street, in Boston, Mass., on the seventh day of July, 1828. My father was the Rev. Samuel Howe, M. A., a rather well-known and popular Episcopal clergyman at the Hub in those days. Our family removed to England when I was yet very young, and consequently my earliest recollections are of London. I remember going to school, where I speedily developed a genius for mischief and for getting into scrapes. I received a liberal allowance of the floggings then fashionable, and I can recall the _hwhish_ of the implement of torture to this day. We are all young but once, and when memory calls up the lively pitched battles, and the pummelings I got and gave at school, I am young again--only my waist is a good deal more expansive, my step is not so elastic or my sight so clear. I could recall the names of some of those boys with whom I fought in those happy school days, and tell how one now adorns the British bench, how another holds a cabinet portfolio, how another fell bravely fighting in Africa, and how several, striving neither for name or fame, "Along the cool, sequestered vale of life Pursue the noiseless tenor of their way"; but it would be useless, as would also my experiences at church, listening to my good father's sermons, and falling constantly asleep.