It has been already said that his father was a rich and respectable merchant; when to this is added that he owned a handsome house in the Horse-market, and that in this house, in the very same chamber where the little Peregrine had always received his Christmas-boxes, the grown-up Peregrine was now receiving them, there is no room to doubt that the place of the strange adventures to be narrated in this history is the celebrated city of Frankfort on the Maine. Of his parents little more is to be told than that they were quiet honest folks, of whom no one could speak any thing but good. The unbounded esteem which Mr. Tyss enjoyed upon 'Change he owed to two circumstances; he always speculated well and safely, gaining one sum after the other; while at the same time he never presumed, but remained modest as before, and made no boast of his wealth, which he showed merely by his haggling about nothing, and being indulgence itself towards insolvent debtors who had fallen into misfortune, even though it were deservedly. For a long time the marriage of Mr. Tyss was unfruitful, till at length, after almost twenty years, Mrs. Tyss rejoiced her husband with a fine lusty boy, who was our identical Master Peregrine Tyss. The boundless joy of the elders may be imagined, and the people of Frankfort yet talk of the splendid christening given by the old Tyss, at which the noblest hock was filled out as if at a coronation festival. But what added still more to the posthumous fame of Mr. Tyss was, that he invited to this christening a couple of people who, in their enmity, had often injured him; and not only them, but others too whom he thought he had injured; so that the feast was really one of peace and reconciliation. Alas! the good man did not suspect that this same child, whose birth so much rejoiced him, would soon be a cause of sorrow. At the very first, the boy Peregrine showed a singular disposition. After he had cried night and day uninterruptedly for some weeks, without their being able to find out any bodily ailment, he became on the sudden quite quiet and as it were stupified into a motionless insensibility: he seemed incapable of the least impression. The little brow, which appeared to belong to a lifeless puppet, was wrinkled neither by tears nor laughter. His mother maintained that it was owing, on her part, to the sight of the old book-keeper, who had for twenty years sat in the counting-house before the great cash-book, with the same lifeless countenance; and she wept bitter tears over the little automaton.