"Eighty pounds a year!" My reader can imagine that this was no great fortune.

I had little or nothing to spend in kid gloves or cigars; indeed, to speak plain, prosaic English, I went without a good dinner far oftener than I had one.

Yet, withal, I was passing rich on eighty pounds a year.
My father, Captain Trevelyan, a brave and deserving officer, died when I was a child.

My mother, a meek, fragile invalid, never recovered his loss, but died some years after him, leaving me alone in the world with my sister Clare.
When I was young I had great dreams of fame and glory.

I was to be a brave soldier like my dear, dead father, or a great writer or a statesman.