Some people are born smart, just as others are born good—some are born stupid—and some are born haunted by the first personal pronoun. People believe they are relating the honest truth when they speak ill of themselves, and yet it is so pleasant to relate appreciative little stories of “ego.” Why mention my early youth in a book only meant to treat of working years?—it may be asked. Well, for this friends are to blame. Folk have constantly asked, “What first made you write? Was it an inherited gift?” Did my second baptismal name predestine my career? On this subject my father wrote in a diary: “The next favours I received from Fortune were domestic ones—a boy and a girl. The name of Ethel was given the little maid to please her mother, that of Brilliana to please me. Brilliana, I called her, out of respect for the only woman of the name of Harley who added by her writings to the celebrity of the race. _The Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley_, 1625-43, wife of Sir Robert Harley, of Brampton Bryan, Knight of the Bath, were reprinted by the Camden Society, with introductions and notes by Thomas Taylor Lewis, M.A., Vicar of Bridstow, Herefordshire.[2] “Of men authors we have had abundance: of women only one. No wonder, then, I wished our daughter to perpetuate her name.” Thus it seems to have been my father’s wish to dedicate me to the memory of the well-known Dame Brilliana who shone in both social and literary circles in the seventeenth century. Did he, perhaps, remember that the old Romans, at the birth of a child, used to choose for it the name of some ancestor, whose career they wished to be its example, in the belief that the deceased would protect and influence the infant to follow in the same path? This second name of mine is queer enough, and seems to have suggested penmanship, followed by a number of strange nicknames, chosen promiscuously by my friends, but all tending in two directions: “Madame la Duchesse.” “Liege Lady.” “She who would be obeyed.” “Grande Dame.” “Esmeralda.” “Carmen.” “Vixen.” Do these denote character?—for they apparently run from the sublime to the ridiculous. My parents seem to have been less careful about choosing me a nurse of a literary turn, however otherwise excellent the woman was, for the following quaint letter to my mother from my old attendant, who was for nearly forty years in the family, is not exactly a model of epistolary art: “I am wrighting to thank you for Papers you so kindly sent Mrs. B—— she wished me to do so i told her i would do so but there was plenty of time for doing it but on Monday morning she very quietly took her long departyer not being any the worse the Delusions was to much for her and she just went off hoping you are quite well also your four Gran children and there parents the wether is very cold for May i remain your Obident “S. D.”