I come from Cambridgeshire--from the fat fen-land down round Ely.

My father was a clergyman.

Well, he wasn't rich, and when I was twenty he gave me his blessing, thirty sovereigns in my pocket, and my passage to the Cape; and I shook his hand, God bless him, and off I came, and here in the old colony and this country I have been for fifty years, for I was seventy yesterday.

Well, I'll tell you more about that another time, it's of the girls I'm speaking now.

After I left home--some years after--my dear old father married again, a youngish woman with some money, but rather beneath him in life, and by her he had one son, and then died.