CHAPTER I.
Birth--My Father--Tamerlane--Ben Brain--French Protestants--East Anglia--Sorrow and Troubles--True Peace--A Beautiful Child--Foreign Grave--Mirrors--Alpine Country Emblems--Slow of Speech--The Jew--Strange Gestures.
On an evening of July, in the year 18--, at East D---, a beautiful little town in a certain district of East Anglia, I first saw the light.
My father was a Cornish man, the youngest, as I have heard him say, of seven brothers.

He sprang from a family of gentlemen, or, as some people would call them, gentillatres, for they were not very wealthy; they had a coat of arms, however, and lived on their own property at a place called Tredinnock, which being interpreted means _the house on the hill_, which house and the neighbouring acres had been from time immemorial in their possession.

I mention these particulars that the reader may see at once that I am not altogether of low and plebeian origin; the present age is highly aristocratic, and I am convinced that the public will read my pages with more zest from being told that I am a gentillatre by birth with Cornish blood {1} in my veins, of a family who lived on their own property at a place bearing a Celtic name signifying the house on the hill, or more strictly the house on the _hillock_.
My father was what is generally termed a posthumous child--in other words, the gentillatre who begot him never had the satisfaction of invoking the blessing of the Father of All upon his head, having departed this life some months before the birth of his youngest son.

The boy, therefore, never knew a father's care; he was, however, well tended by his mother, whose favourite he was; so much so, indeed, that his brethren, the youngest of whom was considerably older than himself, were rather jealous of him.

I never heard, however, that they treated him with any marked unkindness; and it will be as well to observe here that I am by no means well acquainted with his early history, of which, indeed, as I am not writing his life, it is not necessary to say much.