Excerpt from The Spanish Dowry: A Romance As a child 1 had lived at home in a northern town, where it seemed to me that my father worked very hard, and did not make enough money to pay for my mother's frocks - at least, i used to hear some thing like that when my maternal grandmother came to see us. My father and i liked each other very much indeed; my sisters were at school; I never saw much of my mother, and i hated my grand mother. My misfortune came about when I was still a little chap. My father and l were both in a railway accident; he was but slightly hurt, and was taken home to recover; i, with one leg hopelessly injured, was taken to a hospital to lie long in pain. But it was my father who died and I who recovered. He had been dead for some months before they thought fit to tell me, and by that time our relatives had made a division of the family. My mother, with my sisters, went back to her parents' house, and my father's brother offered to adopt me. One day, in the hospital, the nurses put me in a little white room of? The big ward where i had hitherto been. They told me that I was going home. I had been up and about the ward in the afternoons for two or three days, learning to hop on my new crutch; and everybody had so praised my agility and admired my new crutch and new clothes that I felt very fine and perfectly happy. I fell asleep that day in the little white room, and next hearing my grandmother's hated voice, I lay still. I always kept as still as possible when with her, in order not to attract her notice. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.