Sinopsis

The Unlucky Day of the Fool's MonthHigh Street, West BromwichMy First Pedestrian TriumphThe Common English BrackenThe Sense of Beauty. I 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 placeneither town nor country. It is a compact businesslike town now, and its spreading industries have defaced the lovely fringe of country which used to be around it.