ABSTRACT
I was born July 13, 1793, at Helpstone, a gloomy village in Northamptonshire, on the brink of the Lincolnshire fens; my mother’s maiden name was Stimson, a native of Caistor, a neighboring village, whose father was a town shepherd as they are called, who has the care of all the flocks of the village; my father was one of fate’s chancelings, who drop into the world without the honour of matrimony. He took the surname of his mother, who to commemorate the memory of a worthless father with more tenderness of lovelorn feeling than he doubtless deserv’d, gave him his surname at his christening, who was a Scotchman by birth, and a schoolmaster by profession, and in this stay at this, and the neighboring villages, went by the name of John Donald Parker. This I had from John Cue of Ufford, an old man who in his young days was a companion and confidential to my run-a-gate of a grandfather; for he left the village and my grandmother, soon after the deplorable accident of misplaced love was revealed to him; but her love was not that frenzy which shortens the days of the victim31 of seduction, for she liv’d to the age of 86, and left this world of troubles, Jan. 1, 1820.
