That I was a very wonderful child, I take for granted; but nevertheless it was not of my own knowledge that I came into possession of the circumstances set down in my former chapters.

But my father's conduct on the occasion of my birth made a notable impression upon all who witnessed it; and Mr.Squills and Mrs.Primmins have related the facts to me sufficiently often to make me as well acquainted with them as those worthy witnesses themselves.

I fancy I see my father before me, in his dark-gray dressing-gown, and with his odd, half-sly, half-innocent twitch of the mouth, and peculiar puzzling look, from two quiet, abstracted, indolently handsome eyes, at the moment he agreed with Helvetius on the propriety of sending me to school as soon as I was born.

Nobody knew exactly what to make of my father,--his wife excepted.
The people of Abdera sent for Hippocrates to cure the supposed insanity of Democritus, "who at that time," saith Hippocrates, dryly, "was seriously engaged in philosophy." That same people of Abdera would certainly have found very alarming symptoms of madness in my poor father; for, like Democritus, "he esteemed as nothing the things, great or small, in which the rest of the world were employed." Accordingly, some set him down as a sage, some as a fool.

The neighboring clergy respected him as a scholar, "breathing libraries;" the ladies despised him as an absent pedant who had no more gallantry than a stock or a stone.