What kind of story begainings does the narrator dislike?

The narrator hates story beginnings with "ancestral home”’

There are some things I must tell before I begin to tell about the treasure-seeking, because I have read books myself, and I know how beastly it is when a story begins, “‘Alas!” said Hildegarde with a deep sigh, “we must look our last on this ancestral home”’—and then some one else says something—and you don’t know for pages and pages where the home is, or who Hildegarde is, or anything about it.

How did the badtable children kbow that their family was going through hard times