"I expect," commenced the Writer, "my story is going to be very different from anything you children may have imagined; in fact, my life has turned out so utterly different from anything it promised to be in the early beginning, that at times upon looking back it seems to be like some wonderful fairy tale--utterly unlike the ordinary fairy tales, however, one reads in books. "The only two good fairies in my case were first and foremost our good old friend Lal, and, secondly, a gentleman who in the early stages of my life was always called the Miser, but who since has become one of the wealthiest, most generous and notable personages in the City of London. As a rule, whenever I think of my early childhood it is with a shudder, for I was running about the streets of London minus any shoes or stockings, with hardly any food save of the smallest and coarsest description, selling newspapers in the streets until late at night, and invariably soundly beaten if I did not take back some miserable coppers at the end of the day. "I may say that these pence I had procured with so much toil were always expended in the public-house by both the man and his wife who were supposed at that time to provide me with the weird accommodation they were pleased to call home. My particular portion of this edifice was a dirty mat by way of a bed, which I shared with a rough-haired terrier dog called Sam. We two, Sam and I, were roofed in with many panes of broken glass in a species of outhouse which may at one time have formed a small conservatory. It must have been a hopeless failure, I am sure, as a conservatory, for I cannot imagine anything growing in it at all. "One thing I am very certain of, I should never have grown either, but should most likely have withered and died in it had I remained, like my possible predecessors the plants, a few blackened and withered sticks of which could still be seen in some broken red flower-pots upon a shelf out of my reach. How these people came to have charge of me I shall never know, but I have sometimes believed, from odds and ends of conversation they let drop when they were quarrelling, which they were always doing, that my real father and mother had died when I was a tiny mite.