BOYHOOD. 27 



so short and dull a sketch of the mind of my grand- 

 father, written by himself, and what he thought and 

 did, and how he worked. I have attempted to write 

 the following account of myself, as if I were a dead 

 man in another world looking back at my own life. 

 Nor have I found this difficult, for life is nearly over 

 with me. I have taken no pains about my style of 

 writing. 



I was born at Shrewsbury on February i2th, 1809, 

 and my earliest recollection goes back only to when 

 I was a few months over four years old, when we 

 went to near Abergele for sea-bathing, and I recol- 

 lect some events and places there with some little 

 distinctness. 



My mother died in July 1817, when I was a little 

 over eight years old, and it is odd that I can 

 remember hardly anything about her except her death- 

 bed, her black velvet gown, and her curiously con- 

 structed work-table. In the spring of this same year 

 I was sent to a day-school in Shrewsbury, where I 

 stayed a year. I have been told that I was much 

 slower in learning than my younger sister Catherine, 

 and I believe that I was in many ways a naughty boy. 



By the time I went to this day-school * my taste 



* Kept by Rev. G. Case, minister England ; and after his early boy- 



of the Unitarian Chapel in the hood he seems usually to have gone 



High Street. Mrs. Darwin was a to church and not to Mr. Case's. 



Unitarian and attended Mr. Case's It appears (St. James' Gazette, 



chapel, and my father as a little Dec. 15, 1883) that a mural tablet 



boy went there with his elder has been erected to his memory in 



sisters. But both he and his the chapel, which is now known 



brother were christened and in- as the ' Free Christian Church.' 



tended to belong to the Church of F. D. 



