The very mention of those days calls up again to view the events they brought with them, almost as vividly as at the time. In solitude and silence the images of a thousand things, gone for ever, come back upon my mind. The past alone is ours; it is our grand possession in the wilderness of time; it is all that we call our own. Memory fixes her eyes ever upon it, like a miser watching his treasure, and culls out the brightest recollections, to place them at the top of her store. Fancy seeks there for many of the materials for the gay fabrics of imagination; and wisdom, too, borrows from the past to provide against the future. Pilgrims as we are, wandering on towards a distant shrine, over a rough and painful road, let us pluck the wild blossoms that grow by the road to deck our pillow, ere we lay down to rest; and though perhaps we can neither give to our own tale, or to that of others, the same interest with which we have felt or have listened, still let us gather up, ere it fades into forgetfulness, all that the old reaper Time lets fall upon our path. I know not well whether I write for myself or others: whether these pages will alone serve to recall to my own mind, in after years, events and tales that are now vivid, but may then be partly effaced from the tablet of memory; or whether they will afford some amusement and some instruction to persons who neither know the writer nor are acquainted with his history. Lest the latter should be the case, I write the following sketch of my early years: My name, then, is James Young, and I was born the second son of an officer in the navy, who had fought in the battle which destroyed the fleet of Llangara, and in that which immortalized the name of Rodney, who gained honour and glory, but little worldly wealth; and died in battle when I had reached the age of eight years, leaving an income of about twelve hundred per annum for the support of his widow and two children. I remember well, even at this moment, the people telling me that my father was dead, and endeavouring to explain to me what death is. But though I could understand that I should never see my parent again, and wept bitterly to think that it was so, yet I could not get my mind to grasp the meaning of being dead, till an accidental occurrence, which took place a few weeks after the news of my father's death had reached England, gave me the first tangible idea of death, and filled me with awe and horror. I had gone out with my brother, who was five or six years older than myself, and was walking on with him rapidly towards Hyde Park, when at the corner of Grosvenor Square we saw a crowd gathered round the step of a door, which I think at that time belonged to the house of Admiral Berkeley. With boyish curiosity we pressed near, and I heard some one say as we approached, "Oh! the man is dead, quite dead, you had better get a shutter, and carry the body to the workhouse."