h those of Joe Punchard, who is
now at this moment, I warrant, smoking his pipe in the lodge at my
park gates. I was eleven years old, a thin slip of a boy, small for
my age, and giving no promise, to be sure, of my present stature
and girth. The neighbors shook their heads sometimes as they looked
at me, and wondered why Mr. John Ellery, if he must adopt a boy--a
strange thing, they thought, for a bachelor to do--did not choose
one of a sturdier make than poor little Humphrey Bold. They even
joked about my name, averring that names assuredly must go by
contraries, for I was Bold by name, and timid by nature. The joke
seemed to me, even then, a very poor one, for a boy must have the
name he is born with, and I have known very delicate and
white-handed folk of the name of Smith.

Mr. Ellery, a bachelor, as I have said, adopted me when my own
father and mother died, which happened when I was still an infant
and, mercifully, too young to understand my loss. My father, as I
called him, was a substantial yeoman whose farm and holding lay
some three miles on the English side of Shrewsbury. He was well on
in years when he adopted me, and dwells in my memory as a strong,
silent man who, when his day's work was done, would sit in the
inglenook with a book upon his knees. This taste for reading marked
him out from the neighboring farmers, with whom, indeed, he had
little in common in any way, so that he was rather respected than
liked by them. But he was wonderfully kind to me, and if my love
for him was qualified with awe, it was from reverence, and not from
fear.

My frail appearance, on which the neighbors jested, caused my
father to look on me sometimes with an anxious eye, and he would
question the housekeeper and the maids about my appetite, and
whether I slept well o' nights. On these matters he need not have
had any concern, since I ate four hearty meals a day, with perhaps
an apple or a hunk of bread in between; while as for sleeping,
Mistress Pennyquick was wont to declare, five out of the seven
mornings in the week, when she woke me, that she knew I would sleep
my brains away. This prediction scarcely troubled me, and since the
motherly creature never disturbed me until I had slept a good nine
hours by the clock, I do not think she was really distressed on
this score.

Until I reached my eleventh birthday I did not go to school, being
taught to read and write and cipher by my father himself. But one
day he set me