For five and twenty years of life I went on very happily, being of an unambitious sort, and knowing neither plague nor pain, through the strength of my constitution and the easiness of my nature. Most of my neighbours seemed to live in perpetual lack of something, and if ever they got it they soon contrived to find something more to hanker for. There were times when I felt that I must be a fool, or to say the least a dullard, for slackness of perception, which kept me satisfied with the life I had to live. But two things may be pleaded well in my excuse on this account; in the first place, all my time was spent among creatures of no ambition—trees, and flowers, and horses, and the like, that have no worry; and what was even to the purpose more, I had no money to enlarge its love. For my Uncle Cornelius—better known to all who had dealings with him as “Corny, the topper”—took care of me, and his main care was to make me useful, as an orphan should be. My father had been his elder brother, and had married rashly a lady of birth and education far above his own, but gifted with little else to help her, unless it were sweetness of disposition, and warmth of heart, and loveliness. These in a world like ours are not of much account for wearing; and she had no chance to wear them out, being taken away quite suddenly. My life was given at the cost of hers, and my father, after lingering for a few months, took his departure to look for her. Old people said that my Uncle Corny had been very fond of my mother, looking up to her in his youthful days, as a wonder of grace and goodness. And even now when he spoke about her, as I have known him to do after a tumbler of grog, his hard grey eyes would glisten softly, like the vinery glass of an afternoon, when a spring cloud passes over it. But none the more for that did he ever plant a shilling in my youthful hand. This proves his due estimate of money as a disadvantage to the young. My uncle possessed an ancient garden, which had once belonged to a monastery; and the times being better than now they are, he was enabled to work it so that he made fair living out of it. We lived in an ancient cottage in the fine old village of Sunbury, or rather to the westward of that village, and higher up the river. Our window looked upon the Thames, with nothing more than the Shepperton Road, and the slope of the bank to look over. What with water-works, grand villas, the railway, and other changes, the place is now so different that a native may scarcely know it. But all was thoroughly simple, quiet, and even dull to lazy folk, in the days of which I am speaking.