CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD

“Childhood, when the child is as a flower of wilding growth, and when it is at one with nature, fellow with the winds and birds.”

W. S.

“That man is fortunate who has half his desires gratified, who lives to see half his desires accomplished,” says Schopenhauer, and taking the axiom to be true I am not going back on it, for certainly more than half of the desires of my boyhood and youth have been fulfilled. I come of a West of Scotland stock which—perhaps in part because of its Scandinavian admixture—has always had in it ‘the wandering blood’: and from my early days, when at the mature age of three I escaped one night from the nursery and was found in the garden at midnight, a huddled little white heap at the foot of a great poplar that was at once my ceaseless delight and wonder and a fascination that was almost terror, a desire of roaming possessed me.”

That William Sharp should be one of the fortunates who, toward the end of life, could say he had fulfilled more than half of his early desires, was due mainly to a ceaseless curiosity and love of adventure, to a happy fearlessness of disposition that prompted him when starting on any quest to seize the propitious moment, and if necessary to burn his boats behind him. He believed himself to have been born under a lucky star. Notwithstanding the great hardships and difficulties that sometimes barred his way, his vivid imagination, aided by a strong will and untiring perseverance, opened to him many doors of the wonderland of life that lured him in his dreams. The adventurous and the romantic were to him as beacons; and though their lights were at times overshadowed by the tragedy of human life, his natural buoyancy of disposition, his power of whole-hearted enjoyment in things large and small, his ready intuitive sympathy, preserved in him a spirit of fine optimism to the end.

The conditions of his early boyhood were favourable to the development of his natural inclination.

He was born on the 12th of September, 1855, at 4 Garthland Place, Paisley, on a day when the bells were ringing for the fall of Sebastopol. He was the eldest of a family of three sons and five daughters. His father, David Galbreath Sharp, a partner in an old-established mercantile house, was the youngest son of William Sharp, whose family originally came from near Dunblane. His mother was a Miss Katherine Brooks, the eldest daughter of William Brooks, Swedish Vice-Consul at Glasgow, and of Swedish descent, whose wife was a Miss Agnes Henderson, related to the Stewarts of Shambellie and the Murrays of Philiphaugh.

Mr. David Sharp was a genial, observant man, humourous, and a finished