WAS it an Englishman or a Frenchman who first remarked that every family had a skeleton in its cupboard?
I am not learned enough to know, but I reverence the observation, whoever made it.

It speaks a startling truth through an appropriately grim metaphor--a truth which I have discovered by practical experience.

Our family had a skeleton in the cupboard, and the name of it was Uncle George.
I arrived at the knowledge that this skeleton existed, and I traced it to the particular cupboard in which it was hidden, by slow degrees.

I was a child when I first began to suspect that there was such a thing, and a grown man when I at last discovered that my suspicions were true.
My father was a doctor, having an excellent practice in a large country town.

I have heard that he married against the wishes of his family.
They could not object to my mother on the score of birth, breeding, or character--they only disliked her heartily.