Excerpt from My Enemy's Daughter: A Novel I was growing a sort of little celebrity in our small town because of my voice and my sup posed musical genius. I mean that I was get ting to be known among all that small middle class whose highest reach toward society was the patronage of the clergyman's wife or the attorney and his family. Our town was divid ed morally, and indeed one might say geograph ically, into three sections. There were the townspeople - ourselves - who lived in the streets on what I may call the middle terrace of the ascent on which chance had placed us. We were all traders, shop-keepers, clerks, mas ter carpenters, a few engineers, two or three teachers of French and music, a good many principals of small English schools, a good many civil servants of the unpretending class. Beneath us stretched, reaching to the water's edge, and straggling away rather toward the rising sun, a lower plateau of population, con sisting of public house keepers, rope - makers, block-makers, fishermen, sailors, and nonde script poor people of all kinds - poor people avowing and indeed going in for pauperism. Above us, and stretching away westward, were the villas and mansions of the gentry, the swells who only came into the town to buy at the shops, or to reach the sea. Of these it is enough to say - for this story has little to do with the aristocracy of the earth - thata noble man who owned nearly all the country round and half the town was the apex of the pyra mid, and the base was formed by the fashion able doctor of our district, the attorney in whose office I worked, two or three clergy men, the collectors of customs and excise, and a few retired naval oflicers. Now these three sections were each a world to'itself. Nobody on the higher plateau knew any thing about us except as people who made things or had things to sell; we knew little of the lower plateau ex cept in an equally general sort of way. There fore when I say that I was becoming a sort of small celebrity, I mean of course only in my own middle sphere. The gentlemen and'la dies above knew and cared just as much about me and my like as the tarry lads of the lower town did, or indeed as the crabs and star-fish on the beach might have done. If any grand personage or grand personage's wife had been attracted by my singing at church some day, and had been good enough to ask the clergy man who the singer was, the answer wonc have been, Only a young man from the town, and that would have settled the matter. That was enough to know; that was all any body could want to know. 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.