THE FORTUNATE MAN
“You will never amount to anything. You will fritter your life away and you will never amount to anything.” Those were the words of my mother . . . her final words . . . spoken to me, of course . . . from her deathbed. My father had died some years earlier, and so, their cottage was now my cottage, and, in the year of our Lord 1799, at the age of seventeen, I had to make my way in the world . . . alone.