CHAPTER I.
I FIND MYSELF A FOUNDLING.
My earliest recollections are of a square courtyard surrounded by high walls and paved with blue and white pebbles in geometrical patterns--circles, parallelograms, and lozenges.

Two of these walls were blank, and had been coped with broken bottles; a third, similarly coped, had heavy folding doors of timber, leaden-grey in colour and studded with black bolt-heads.

Beside them stood a leaden-grey sentry-box, and in this sat a red-faced man with a wooden leg and a pigtail, whose business was to attend to the wicket and keep an eye on us small boys as we played.

He owned two books which he read constantly: one was Foxe's _Martyrs_, and the other (which had no title on the binding) I opened one day and found to be _The Devil on Two Sticks_.
The arch over these gates bore two gilt legends.

That facing the roadway ran: "_Train up a Child in the Way he should Go,_" which prepared the visitor to read on the inner side: "_When he is Old he will not Depart from it._" But we twenty-five small foundlings, who seldom evaded the wicket, and so passed our days with the second half of the quotation, found in it a particular and dreadful meaning.
The fourth and last wall was the front of the hospital, a two-storeyed building of grey limestone, with a clock and a small cupola of copper, weather-greened, and a steeply pitched roof of slate pierced with dormer windows, behind one of which (because of a tendency to walk in my sleep) I slept in the charge of Miss Plinlimmon, the matron.