I can prove as ancient a descent for myself, though the names of my intermediate progenitors between Adam and my grandfathers, Moses and John, have not been preserved. My family belonged to a class always strangely indifferent to written pedigrees, which relied more on oral traditions, the preserving of which has been mostly the duties of females, on account of their superior fluency of speech, and their disposition to cling to their family hearth. My earliest pains were caused by the endless rehearsal of family history to which my nurse was addicted; for soon after sunset each evening she would insist on taking me before some neighbour’s fire, where I would meet about a dozen dames from the Castle Row, prepared to indulge in their usual entertainment of recitations from their stock of unwritten folklore. After a ceremonious greeting and kindly interchange of civil enquiries about each other’s health and affairs, they would soon drift into more serious matter. I have a vague idea that much of it bordered on the uncanny and awful, but I retain a strong impression that most of their conversations related to the past and present of their respective families, courtships, marriages, and deaths being prime events. I also remember that there were many long pauses, during which I could hear a chorus of sympathetic sighs. The episodes which drew these from their affectionate breasts are quite forgotten, but those sighs haunt me still. Such families as were clustered in front of the Green of Denbigh Castle were an exceedingly primitive folk, with far less regard for ancient ancestry than the Bedouin of the Desert. Indeed, I doubt whether any tradesman or farmer in our parts could say who was his great-great-grandfather, or whether one yeoman out of a hundred could tell who was his ancestor of two hundred years back. As King Cazembe said to Livingstone, the ‘Seeker of Rivers,’ ‘We let the streams run on, and do not enquire whence they rise or whither they flow.’ So these simple Welsh people would answer if questioned about their ancestors, ‘We are born and die, and, beyond that, none of us care who were before us, or who shall come after us.’ My personal recollections do not extend beyond the time I lay in the cradle; so that all that precedes this period I have been obliged to take upon trust. Mind and body have grown together, and both will decay according to the tasks or burdens imposed on them. But strange, half-formed ideas glide vaguely into the mind, sometimes, and then I seem not far from a tangible and intelligent view into a distant age. Sometimes the turn of a phrase, a sentence in a book, the first faint outline of a scene, a face like, yet unlike, one whom I knew, an incident, will send my mind searching swiftly down the long-reaching aisles, extending far into remote, pre-personal periods, trying to discover the connection, to forge again the long-broken link, or to re-knit the severed strand.