y Day of the Fool's Month--High Street, West
Bromwich--My First Pedestrian Triumph--The Common English
Bracken--The Sense of Beauty.

I remember that in a fit of petulance at some childish misdemeanour, my
mother once told me that I came into the world on the unlucky day of the
fool's month. It was her picturesque way of saying that I was born on
the thirteenth of April. I have often since had occasion to think that
there was a wealth of prophetic wisdom in the phrase which neither she
nor I suspected at the time.

I did the world the poor service of being born into it in the year 1847,
in a house not now to be identified in the straggling High Street of
West Bromwich, which in those days was a rather doleful hybrid of a
place--neither town nor country. It is a compact business-like town now,
and its spreading industries have defaced the lovely fringe of country
which used to be around it.

Its great peculiarity to a thoughtful child lay in the fact that even
at his small rate of progress he could pass in an hour from the clink,
clink, clink on the anvils of the poor nailmakers, who worked in their
own sordid back kitchens about the Ling or Virgin's End, to a rural
retirement and quiet as complete as you may find to-day about Charlcote
or Arden, or any other nook of the beautiful Shakespeare country. Since
the great South Staffordshire coal fault was circumvented, nearly
all the wide reaches of rural land which I remember are overgrown and
defaced by labour. The diamond stream in which I used to bathe as a boy,
where you could have counted the pebbles at the bottom, was running ink,
and giving forth vile odours, when last I saw it. But fifty years ago,
or more, there was the most exquisite green fringe to that fire-rotted,
smoke-stained, dirty mantle of a Black Country. In the extreme stillness
of the summer fields, and more especially, as I seem to remember, in
a certain memorable hush which came when afternoon was shading into
evening, you could hear the clank of pig-iron which was being loaded
into the boats on the canal at Bromford, quite two miles away, and the
thump of a steam hammer at Dawes's foundry.

I have begun many a child's ramble by a walk down Bromford Lane, to look
in at the half-naked figures there sweating and toiling at the puddling
furnaces, and have brought it to an end in the middle of the fairy ring
on Stephenson's hills, only a couple of miles away, in what felt like
the very heart