As I am perhaps the chief actor in the latter part of this history, and as in matters of this sort it is always best, according to my way of thinking, to begin at the very beginning, I may perhaps be excused if I briefly narrate the principal events of my life which led up to my connection with it.
To begin with, let me remark that I was born in the village of Coombe, near Salisbury, in the county of Wiltshire, where my father was a country doctor. He, poor man, had the misfortune to be peculiarly devoted to his profession, so much so, that it was neither more nor less than sheer overwork which occasioned his untimely end.
That sad event occurred within a week of my seventh birthday. And with the remembrance of his funeral, a peculiarly sombre picture rises before my mind's eye. I see a dreary autumnal day; thick mists upon the hill-tops, dripping trees, and a still more dismal procession, winding its way along the high-road, unrelieved by any touch of colour. And, incongruously enough, the whole recollection is heightened by the remembrance of a pair of black cloth breeches worn by me on that melancholy occasion for the first time. By such small and seemingly unimportant things are great events impressed upon our memories.
Perhaps after my father's death I proved myself a handful to manage; perhaps my mother really thought it the best thing for me. At any rate, a boarding-school was chosen for me at Plymouth, to which she herself reluctantly conducted me. Being her only child, and having hitherto been accustomed to get my own way at all times and seasons, this maternal abandonment was a proceeding I could not appreciate. I evinced, I believe, a decided objection to saying farewell to her, and I know I found only inadequate consolation in either the ancient dame who kept the school (who promised my parent to be a mother to me, and for that reason perhaps caned me soundly before I had been twenty-four hours under her charge), the house, or my school-fellows, who figure in my memory as the most objectionable set of young ruffians with whom I had ever come into contact.
For three years I continued a pupil of this "Seminary for the Sons of Gentlemen," and should perhaps have remained longer had I not experienced the misfortune of being expelled, for laying a fellow-scholar's head open with a drawing-board; a precocity at ten years which was plainly held to foreshadow my certain ultimate arrival at the condemned cell and the gallows. After that, from the age of ten until fifteen, I drifted from school to school, deriving but small benefit from any one of them, and every term bringing my dear mother's grey hairs (as she would persist in putting it) nearer and nearer to the grave, by reason of the unsatisfactory nature of my reports.
At fifteen, being a well-set-up stripling for my years, and like to fall into all sorts of errors as to my proper importance in life, if allowed to remain any longer with boys younger than myself, I was taken away and carried to London, in order that my mother might consult with an old friend as to my future. How well I remember that journey, and the novelty of seeing London for the first time!
Arriving at Waterloo, we drove to Notting Hill, and next morning went by omnibus into the city to discover Sir Benjamin Plowden in the East India Avenue.
Never, if I live to be a hundred, shall I forget my first impression of that office, and the unaccustomed and humiliating feeling which stole over me as I crossed the threshold behind my mother, to await an audience with this mysterious Sir Benjamin. It was one thing, I discovered, to be the cock of a small country school, and quite another to be an applicant for a junior clerkship, at a salary of five shillings a week, in a London merchant's office.
At the end of five minutes a liveried servant entered the waiting-room, and informed us that "Sir Benjamin would see us now, if we'd be good enough to step this way." Thereupon my mother gathered up her impedimenta, including a reticule, a small black handbag, an umbrella, a shawl, a paper bag of sponge-cakes, and her spectacle-case, and toddled down the passage after him, leaving me to follow in her wake, my heart the while thumping like a flail against my ribs.
Ever since that morning, when I desire to realize a man in every way embodying my idea of what a merchant prince should be, I recall my first impression of Sir Benjamin. At the date of our visit he was on the hither side of fifty, of medium height, stout and bald, with curly white whiskers, a shaven chin and upper lip, very rosy as to his complexion, dignified in his bearing, and given to saying "Hum, ha!" on all possible occasions.