Excerpt from A Few Footprints I was born March e4th, 1823, in Blackwater, a small village, situated between Redruth and Truro, in Cornwall, which contained at the time about two hundred inhabitants. My father was a Cornishman and by trade a carpenter, and my mother, whose maiden name was Passmore, was a native of Newton Abbot, Devonshire. I had three brothers, William, Richard, and James. The cottage in which I and my brothers were born consisted of four small rooms. As there was not much carpentering to do in the neighbourhood, and my father not being fully employed, he built, mainly by borrowed money, a larger house near by, for which he obtained a public-house licence. Though the new house had eight small rooms, it had more rooms than windows consequently two bedrooms at the back of the house had no direct window light, but only borrowed light from a small window between the two rooms, over the stairs. I mention this circumstance to recall the fact that during the early part of the last century almost every thing consumed by the people was taxed, including the wood, glass, and other materials used in the production of windows, and the windows as well. One of the results of this state of things was that I, with one of my brothers, slept thousands of times in a small bedroom into which the light of heaven never directly entered. As with us, so with hundreds of thousands of others. The window tax alone assisted to enfeeble the British race. As with the window tax, so with hundreds of other taxes, including the tax on bread, which still more enfeebled the race, and which a partisan states manship would triumphantly re-impose, and thereby endanger the power and prosperity of the country. I well remember some Of the blighting effects of the Corn Laws, when large numbers of the industrious poor of Cornwall ate barley bread, and many had not enough of that. The repeal of the Corn Laws and the introduc tion of a Free Trade era soon broadened and brightened national prospects. 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.