Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. The manuscript from which these pages have been printed was not written with any intention that it should ever be published. It was meant merely as a narrative for the perusal of the writer's own children, depicting as it does his own early life. This could never have been known to them unless it had been set down in some such succinct form as the writer has made his manuscript assume.