I was born in the year 1853, one of a respectable family of dalesmen in Cumberland, and after a boyhood wherein the passionate love of solitary wandering over the wild north country fells seems the only trait I think worth recording, I was sent to study medicine at Edinburgh. Here I had a successful if not a distinguished career, and after taking the required degrees I departed to the East to practise my profession and to amass the conventional fortune. In the former object I trust I have performed my duty satisfactorily; and as to the second, I have at any rate acquired a sufficient pension for the needs of my evening of life. I have also found alleviation and no small degree of pleasure in my chosen science, especially in the study of certain tropical diseases, though my natural inclination for privacy has hitherto prevented my publishing some interesting notes and observations covering many years' research in this particular section of medicine. In my domestic life however I have been less fortunate, for having married an estimable woman with every prospect of a joint happy existence before us, we were both deeply wounded in the deaths at rapid intervals of our four children, a series of blows that I myself, thanks to my profession and other interests in life, was able to bear with tolerable courage. Not so my poor partner; from the date of her last boy's loss at Singapore she could support this prolonged visitation of malign fortune no longer, and after a short but terrible attack of violent dementia she relapsed into a permanent condition of apathetic melancholy, from which she either could not or would not be diverted. I hope and trust I did all that was possible by patience and calmness to soften her hard lot; but, needless to say, it was a cheerless home wherein I moved, until after many years my suffering wife was at last called to rejoin her lost children.