to the highest, which is Polite Education, I have been able to discard without concern or loss of self-respect.  This fact alone should furnish good reason for my Memoirs, and commend them to the philosopher, the poet, the divine, and the man of feeling.  For true it is that I have been bare to the shirt and yet proved my manhood, beaten like a thief and yet maintained myself honest, scorned by men and women and yet been ready to serve my fellows, held atheist by the godly and yet clung to my Saviour’s cross.  In situations calculated to excite the contemptuous ridicule of the meanest upon earth I have been satisfied that I was neither contemptible nor reasonably ridiculous, and that while I might herd with ruffians, and find in their society my most comfortable conversation, I was the richer, partly for that I had lost in choosing to consort with them, and partly for what I had gained.  As having nothing, yet possessing all things; as poor, yet making many rich—­the boast of St. Paul, the hope of St. Francis of Assisi! in those pithy antitheses is the summa of my experience.

Eldest son, but third child, of my parents, I was born upon the 4th of October, in the year 1700; and for that reason and another (to which I shall shortly allude) was named Francis, after the great Champion of our faith commemorated upon my birthday.  The other reason was that, oddly enough, my mother, before my birth, had dreamed of him so persistently and with particulars so unvaried that she gave my father no option but to change the settled habits of our family and bestow upon me the name, which he despised, of a patriarch whom he underrated.  Her dream, repeated, she told me, with exact fidelity and at regularly recurring periods, was that she could see St. Francis standing on a wide sea-shore between sand-dunes and the flood of waters—­standing alone there with an apple in his hand, which he held lightly, as if weighing it.  By and by, said my mother, she saw three women come slowly over the sandhills from different points, one from the south, one from the north, and one from the west; but they converged as they drew near to St. Francis, joined hands, and came directly to him.  The midmost of the three was like a young queen; she on the side nearest the sea was bold and meagre; the third was lovely, but disfigured by a scar.  When they were come before St. Francis, after reverences, they knelt down on his right hand and his left, and the queenly woman in front of him.  To her, courteously, he first offered the apple, but she laughingly refused it.  She of the scar, when it was held before her, covered her face with her hands and shrank away; but the hardy woman craned her head forward and bit into the apple while it was yet in the saint’s hand.  Then the young queen would have had it if she might, but was prevented by the biter, and the two clamoured for it, silently, by gestures of the hands and eyes, but with haste and passion.  At this point, said my mother, her dream always ended, and she never knew who had the apple.  She fretted greatly because of it, and was hardly recovered after I was born.