Life in the country is full of practical teachings; whereas life in the city may be degraded by frivolities and pleasures, which are too often the foes of work.

Hence we have usually to go to out-of-the-way corners of the country for our hardest brain-workers.
Contact with the earth is a great restorer of power; and it is to the country folks that we must ever look for the recuperative power of the nation as regards health, vigour, and manliness.
Bainbridge is a remote country village, situated among the high lands or Fells on the north-western border of Yorkshire.

The mountains there send out great projecting buttresses into the dales; and the waters rush down from the hills, and form waterfalls or Forces, which Turner has done so much to illustrate.

The river Bain runs into the Yore at Bainbridge, which is supposed to be the site of an old Roman station.
Over the door of the Grammar School is a mermaid, said to have been found in a camp on the top of Addleborough, a remarkable limestone hill which rises to the south-east of Bainbridge.

It is in this grammar-school that we find the subject of this little autobiography.
He must be allowed to tell the story of his life--which he describes as 'Work: Good, Bad, and Indifferent--in his own words: "I was born on November 20th, 1853.