Explore "Edgar Wallace by Himself" by Edgar Wallace on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Generally speaking, there is no mystery about birth, even in the least creditable circumstances. The most mysterious thing that can happen to any man is not to be born at all. Less mystery why, swathed (one presumes) in voluminous shawls, one should be carried from Ashburnham Road to a little court hard by the Deptford Creek which separates the Royal Town of Greenwich from the unsalubrious purlieus of Deptford.
I was adopted at the age of nine days. Otherwise there might have been for me a romantic upbringing in Greenwich Workhouse or one of those institutions whither motherless and fatherless persons of nine days old and having no visible means of support are brought to maturity. Happily, there was a philanthropist who heard of my plight, and having for the workhouse the loathing which is the proper possession of the proud poor, he dispatched Clara to fetch me,