My Story

od, and crossing to Liverpool while still a young man he had established himself there in a humble way of life. If I were writing an autobiography in the accepted sense I think I should be tempted to tell some touching stories of how my father, as a friendless and penniless boy, scrambled and starved himself through the seven long years that were supposed to be necessary to teach him a trade; and again, after he had married and children had begun to come, starved and scrambled, or at least pinched and deprived himself, with the cheerful co-operation of my mother, through the years in which I and myfirst brother and sister had to be sent to school. The world went well with him in later days, and his children of a younger brood knew nothing of his privations, but it is not for me, as his eldest son, to forget the stoical unselfishness to which I owe so much. I have spoken of the life of the Manx people in their own island as that of a close community, self-centred and conservative, and suffering in various ways from this catlike devotion to home. But there is the Gipsy in the Manx people, too, and no lack of the adventurous spirit. Inheriting something from their Viking ancestors, Manxmen are good colonists, and I think there is no remote corner of the world yet visited by me where I have not found a Manxman settled. He does well nearly everywhere, and contentedly adapts himself to the country that becomes his foster mother. But he never forgets his natural mothe... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.