Adrift with a Vengeance: a Tale of Love and Adventure

As memory is not bom with oar birth, bat ripens with oar growth, the recollections of my childhood previoos to my seventh year are dim as a dream to me now. Everything that occarred to me, if remembered at all, I can only see as through a glass darkly; and a perpetual haze envelops the incidents which I sometimes vainly strive to place in bolder relief against the background ofT ime. It will be enough if resting my reliance upon memory in preference to tradition, I give the chronicle of my life in the order in which events occurred to me, commencing as far back as I can remember, and no farther. I am thus led to a small village, on theN ew-E ngland seaX board, not far from Boston, where I cultivated the habit of .making mud-pies, and indulged a natural propenrfity for other congenial tasks, and, I hope, harmless amusements common to children of my age. There I had my home in the cottage of one to whom I first lisped the sublime name of Mother, who had nursed me in infancy, and followed my tottering steps when, escaping from the restraints of a cradle, I first essayed vV to walk ;who cherished me as her own, although I was not her own. It was a delusion almost natural to childhood that I should have conceived her to be my mother, although as a child I knew not what mother meant; and I was disappointed when, with the advance of years, I came to the knowledge that she was only my foster-mother, and that my own origin was in fy volved in obscurity.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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