When You last saw me, I was a boy of thirteen. You now see me a man of twenty-three.

The story of my life, in the interval¹ between these two ages, is a story that can be soon told.

Speaking of my father first, I have to record that the end of his career did indeed come as Dame² Dermody had foretold³ it. Before we had been a year in America, the total collapse⁴ of his land speculation⁵ was followed by his death. The catastrophe⁶ was complete. But for my mother’s little income (settled on her at her marriage) we should both have been left helpless at the mercy of the world.

We made some kind friends among the hearty⁷ and hospitable⁸ people of the United States, whom we were unaffectedly sorry to leave. But there were reasons which inclined us to return to our own country after my father’s death; and we did return accordingly.

Besides her brother-in-law (already mentioned in the earlier pages of my narrative⁹), my mother had another relative — a cousin named Germaine — on whose assistance she mainly relied for starting me, when the time came, in a professional career. I remember it as a family rumor¹⁰, that Mr. Germaine had been an unsuccessful suitor for my mother’s hand in the days when they were young people together. He was still a bachelor at the later period when his eldest¹¹ brother’s death without issue placed him in possession of a handsome fortune. The accession of wealth made no difference in his habits of life: he was a lonely old man,

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