As old Bill Scroggs was wont to boast: “Hadfield was in the right proper place, it being in the best shire in the Kingdom. Darby-shir (Derbyshire) is where Mr. George Eliot (only he said ‘Helliot’) got his ‘Adam Bede’ frum (only he said ‘Hadam Bede’). Darby-shir is where Hum-fry Ward (he pronounced it ‘Waard’) placed the ‘Histry o’ Davvid Grieve.’ If that don’t top off the glory, it is Darby-shir that has geen to the waarld Florence Nightengale, Hangel of the British Harmy!” It was in the first of those ten years that I had been bereft of my parents and had gone to live with my Aunt Millie and Uncle Stanwood. In commenting on her benevolence in taking me, Aunt Millie often said: “If it had been that none of my own four babbies had died, I don’t know what you’d have done, I’m sure. I shouldn’t have taken you!” But there I was, a very lucky lad indeed to have a home with a middle-class tradesman in Station Road. My uncle’s property consisted of a corner shop and an adjoining house. The door of the shop looked out upon the main, cobbled thoroughfare, and upon an alleyway which ended at a coffin-maker’s, where all the workhouse coffins were manufactured. We passed back and forth to the shop through a low, mysterious door, which in “The Mysteries of Udolpho” would have figured in exciting, ghostly episodes, so was it hidden in darkness in the unlighted storeroom from which it led. As for the shop itself, it was a great fish odor, for its counters, shelves and floor had held nothing else for years and years. The poultry came only in odd seasons, but fish was always with us: blue mussels, scalloped cockles, crabs and lobsters, mossy mussels, for shell fish: sole, conger eels, haddock, cod, mackerel, herring, shrimps, flake and many other sorts for the regular fish. Then, of course, there were the smoked kind: bloaters, red herrings, kippered herring, finnan haddock, and salt cod. In the summer the fish were always displayed outside, with ice and watercresses for their beds, on white platters. Then, too, there were platters of opened mussels a little brighter than gold in settings of blue. My uncle always allowed me to cut open the cod so that I might have the fishhooks they had swallowed. There was not a shopkeeper in the row that had half as much artistic window display skill as had Uncle Stanwood. He was always picking up “pointers” in Manchester. When the giant ray came in from Grimsby, the weavers were always treated to a window display twice more exciting than the butcher offered every Christmas, when he sat pink pigs in chairs in natural human postures, their bodies glorified in Christmas tinsel. Uncle Stanwood took those giant fish, monstrous, slimy, ugly nightmares, sat them in low chairs, with tail-flappers curled comically forward, with iron rimmed spectacles on their snouts, a dented derby aslant beady eyes, and a warden’s clay pipe prodded into a silly mouth--all so clownish a sight