CHAPTER I 



BIRTH, CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION 



I WAS born at Sedbury Park, in West Gloucestershire, on 

 a sunny Sunday morning (the nth of May, 1828), being the 

 youngest of the ten children of George and Sarah Orme- 

 rod, of Sedbury Park, Gloucestershire, and Tyldesley, 

 Lancashire. As a long time had elapsed since the birth 

 of the last of the other children (my two sisters and 

 seven brothers), my arrival could hardly have been a family 

 comfort. Nursery arrangements, which had been broken 

 up, had to be re-established. I have been told that I started 

 on what was to be my long life journey, with a face pale as 

 a sheet, a quantity of black hair, and a constitution that 

 refused anything tendered excepting a concoction of a kind 

 of rusk made only at Monmouth. The very earliest event 

 of which I have a clear remembrance was being knocked 

 down on the nursery stairs when I was three years old by a 

 cousin of my own age. The damage was small, but the 

 indignity great, and, moreover, the young man stole the 

 lump of sugar which was meant to console me, so the 

 grievance made an impression. A year later a real shock 

 happened to my small mind. Whilst my sister, Georgiana, 

 five years my senior, was warming herself in the nursery, 

 her frock caught fire. She flew down the room, threw 

 herself on the sheepskin rug at the door, and rolled till 

 the fire was put out. But she was so badly burnt that 

 the injuries required dressing, and this event also made a 

 great impression on me. Other reminiscences of pleasure 

 and of pain come back, in thinking over those long past 

 days, but none of such special and wonderful interest as 

 that of being held up to see King William IV. Little 

 as I was, I had been taken to one of the theatres, and my 

 father carried me along one of the galleries, and raised me 

 in his arms that I might look through the glass window 



