WHETHER I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life or
whether that station will be held by anybody else, these
pages must show. To begin at the beginning, I record that
I was born (as I have been informed and believe) toward the small
hours on a Friday night, at Blunderstone, in Suffolk. I was a post-
humous child. My father's eyes closed upon the light of this world
six months before mine opened. There is something strange to me,
even now, in the reflection that he never saw me; and something
stranger yet in the shadowy remembrance of my childish com-
passion for his white gravestone lying alone in the churchyard.

He had once been the favorite of an aunt who was the principal
magnate of our family. But Miss Trotwood, or Miss Betsey, as my
poor mother called her, when she sufficiently overcame her dread
of this formidable personage to mention her at all, was mortally
affronted by his marriage, on the ground that my mother, whom
she had never seen, was "a wax doll."

On the afternoon of what I may be excused for calling that
eventful Friday, however, my mother was sitting before the fire,

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