The Unwilling Adventurer

THE wayfarer on life's highway who has reached that stage of this earthly pilgrimage which is graciously miscalled middle age -a period when the full-blooded green of summer begins to show certain sere and yellow adumbrations of approaching autumn; when the silvery frost of age has begun to gather on the temples and Time has written, in many a lined inscription, the epitaph of passions dead and gone, of sorrows buried and forgotten; if he should pause to look back and retrace in memory the stages of his journey, will surely let his eye roam fondly over the fairer scenes - the shady dells, the flower sprinkled meadows, the quiet streams by which he has rested in joy and peace - rather than the dismal wilderness through which he has struggled, despairing and dismayed... But I should seem a dull historian if I should fill these pages with an account of my childhood or even of my youth; which, to speak the truth, were as little eventful as those of other country-bred lads, so I shall pass over these early days and come to that period when my misfortunes and adventures began.Yet it is necessary for me shortly to inform the reader as to my condition, that I may not come before him as a complete stranger; for otherwise would much of that which follows be barely intelligible.My father, then, was a Kentish yeoman, or gentleman farmer as they say nowadays, of a good family though of slender means, and a very agreeable and cultivated man, as I have been told. But I have no clear recollection of him, for he died before I was yet five years old, and was followed a few months later by my mother; when, as my high relations would have none of me, I came to live with a kinsman of my mother, Mr Roger Leigh of Shorne, in Kent. And at Shorne I remained up to the time at which this history opens, finding in Mr Leigh and his wife the kindest and most indulgent of parents, and in their daughter Prudence, a loyal and affectionate sister...