Excerpt from The Autobiography of Mary Smith, Schoolmistress and Nonconformist: A Fragment of a Life My father was married young, being at the time little more than twenty. My mother was his senior by a year or two. He brought her to his ancestral home, in a row of houses which faced the church. It was built of stone, and thatched, like all the others in the village (except the vicar's); a large rambling house with plenty of room in it; the shop on one side, with its low casement window and half-door, the latter of which hung open all summer long. The dwelling house was on the other side, with its carpetless stone floor and bed rooms and large attics, which last served in after years for additional bed rooms, or store rooms for apples. 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.