‘As I read over the lives of these robbers and _Frontispiece_ pickpockets, strange doubts began to arise in my mind about virtue and crime’ ‘Fool, indeed! . . . or I’ll forfeit the box’ _page_ 8 ‘Once I saw him standing in the middle of a dusty 32 road’ ‘A wild grimy figure of a man . . . fashioning a 96 piece of iron’ ‘There’s night and day, brother, both sweet 186 things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?’ ‘All safe with me; I never peach, and scorns a 224 trap; so now, dear, God bless you!’ ‘I am willing to encourage merit, sir; . . . I 240 have determined that you shall translate my book of philosophy’ ‘The bar of the gate’ 416 Mrs. Herne 512 ‘The blow which I struck the Tinker’ 544 Isopel Berners 560 ‘The man in black’ 600 CHAP. ONE BIRTH—MY FATHER—TAMERLANE—BEN BRAIN—FRENCH PROTESTANTS—EAST ANGLIA—SORROW AND TROUBLES—TRUE PEACE—A BEAUTIFUL CHILD—FOREIGN GRAVE—MIRRORS—THE ALPINE COUNTRY—EMBLEMS—SLOWNESS OF SPEECH—THE JEW—SOME STRANGE GESTURES On an evening of July, in the year 18--, at East D---, a beautiful little town in a certain district of East Anglia, I first saw the light. My father was a Cornish man, the youngest, as I have heard him say, of seven brothers. He sprang from a family of gentlemen, or, as some people would call them, gentillâtres, for they were not very wealthy; they had a coat of arms, however, and lived on their own property at a place called Tredinnock, which being interpreted means _the house on the hill_, which house and the neighbouring acres had been from time immemorial in their possession. I mention these particulars that the reader may see at once that I am not altogether of low and plebeian origin; the present age is highly aristocratic, and I am convinced that the public will read my pages with more zest from being told that I am a gentillâtre by birth with Cornish blood {1} in my veins, of a family who lived on their own property at a place bearing a Celtic name, signifying the house on the hill, or more strictly the house on the _hillock_.