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a man of fashion would be able to cut his cheek upon his own collar if he turned his head too sharply. But it was nevertheless a time of increasing opportunity in our country, when a man of means could easily footle his way through a fortune if so inclined. My father was never one to spend the best part of a day patrolling the Strand just so that a young lady might notice the tension in his trouser-leg, and the particular shade of a canary glove. He was, however, of a disposition to enjoy himself – and it is evident from the gradual slide in his fortunes that a period of living in fine lodgings, with good pictures on the walls, and expensive china on the table, and servants to bring him whatever comforts he required, was sufficient to consume a large part of the wealth he had dug from those distant sands.
    Whether he would eventually have slithered all the way into poverty I cannot say. What I know for certain is this: before his third decade was very far advanced (which is to say the first part of the 1780s), he encountered the steadying influence that was my mother. She was the daughter of an ostler who ran a successful business onthe eastern edge of the city, where day-visitors from Edmonton and Enfield would stable their horses, and often stay for dinner before completing their journeys home. Her experience in this place had turned a diligent child into a thrifty young woman. She soon persuaded my father to moderate his ways, and set him on the path that led to respectability in the world. He surrendered his cards and dice. He abandoned certain doubtful connections. He regulated his hours. He made himself a more pleasing prospect. And when he had showed the steadiness of his resolve for almost a year, she accepted the sincerity of his feelings and they were married.
    It now became necessary for my parents to find useful employment. The obvious choice, given the history of both of them, was to run an inn – which soon they did. Not, however, an inn lying close to either of their previous connections, but one that proved the spirit of independence I would like to claim as my inheritance. The inn I have already mentioned, and will now give its proper name: the Hispaniola.
    The place was at once marriage-bed, home and livelihood. And one more thing besides. For it was here, after only a year of bliss, in a room more like a fo’c’sle than anything on dry land, with a timber ceiling and walls, and a bay window overlooking the river, that my mother gave breath to me and was deprived of her own life in one and the same instant. I had, of course, no immediate knowledge of this. But from my first moment of remembered consciousness, which occurred some three years later, I was aware of what I had lost. To speak plainly: I grew up in an atmosphere stained by melancholy.
    The weight of bereavement must nearly have broken my father. If the evidence of my own eyes had not told me this, I would have understood it from those who drank in our taproom, and had known him before the tragedy occurred. In the accounts they gave me, what had formerly been spirited in him was now subdued, what had looked for excitement now longed formoderation, and what had imagined the future now clung to the past.
    You might wonder how the Hispaniola managed to survive these changes in my father. Sadness, after all, is not the common fare of inns. Yet survive it did – for reasons that shed some light on the variety of pleasures men seek in the world. Some individuals, it is true, did not appreciate his sombre character, and these my father dismissed with directions to other establishments on the waterfront, which they might find more to their taste. But there were few ejections of this kind. The majority of our neighbours looked on the Hispaniola as a welcome relief from the raucousness and vulgarity of the world. They considered it a haven.
    In saying this, I realise that I might appear to suggest my father had an unfriendly and withdrawn character. Yet