My name is Warneford--at least it is not very unlike that--and I was born at Itchen, a village distant in those days about a mile and a half, by land and ferry, from Southampton. How much nearer the, as I hear and read, rapidly-increasing town has since approached I can not say, as it will be twenty-nine years next July since I finally quitted the neighborhood. The village, at that time, chiefly inhabited by ferry and fishermen, crept in a straggling sort of way up a declivity from the margin of the Itchen river, which there reaches and joins the Southampton estuary, till it arrives at Pear-Tree Green, an eminence commanding one of the finest and most varied land-and-water views the eye of man has, I think, ever rested upon. My father, a retired lieutenant of the royal navy, was not a native of the place, as his name alone would sufficiently indicate to a person acquainted with the then Itchen people--almost every one of whom was either a Dible or a Diaper--but he had been many years settled there, and Pear-Tree church-yard contained the dust of his wife and five children--I and my sister Jane, who was a year older than myself, being all of his numerous family who survived their childhood. We were in fair circumstances, as my father, in addition to his half-pay, possessed an income of something above a hundred pounds a year. Jane and I were carefully, though of course not highly or expensively educated; and as soon as I had attained the warrior-age of fifteen, I was dispatched to sea to fight my country's battles--Sir Joseph Yorke having, at my father's request, kindly obtained a midshipman's warrant for me; and not many weeks after joining the ship to which I was appointed, I found myself, to my great astonishment, doubling the French line at the Nile--an exploit which I have since read of with far more satisfaction than I remember to have experienced during its performance.