Among other public buildings in a certain town which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning and to which I will assign no fictitious name there is one anciently common to most towns great or small: to wit a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter.
For a long time after it was ushered into this world of sorrow and trouble by the parish surgeon it remained a matter of considerable doubt whether the child would survive to bear any name at all; in which case it is somewhat more than probable that these memoirs would never have appeared; or if they had that being comprised within a couple of pages they would have possessed the inestimable merit of being the most concise and faithful specimen of biography extant in the literature of any age or country.