You'll help me to carry out my plan; you and Jane will; you and Jane! I've got to be such an old man all at once, as it seems, and I dursn't have waited much longer without telling you what I had in my mind.

See now, I'll go back to when I was a boy, as far back as I can remember.

You know I was born in Clerkenwell, and I've told you a little now and then of the hard times I went through.

My poor father and mother came out of the country, thinking to better themselves; instead of that, they found nothing but cold and hunger, and toil and moil.

They were both dead by when I was between thirteen and fourteen.