University of Virginia Library

“Do you recollect when you were last with
us, you asked me, on occasion of my describing
some of the scenes of my youthful days,
to give you a chapter from my early life? If
you have forgotten your request and my promise
to comply with it, the accompanying
manuscript will remind you of both, and at
the same time of the proverb—“Give him an
inch and he will take an ell.” A short time
after you left us, I one day got Alfred to
make me some good pens, and taking a sheet
of his large school paper, that I might have
“room and verge enough,” I sat down to fulfil
my promise. I soon found myself at the end
of the sheet with my chapter unfinished, and

what I had written appearing to me very meager.
The effort, however, created an interest
in the occupation. Half-buried recollections
with their trains of association rose up. The
motives of pleasure and curiosity added themselves
to the simple purpose of keeping my
word to you. The design of enveloping fact
in fiction grew out of them. I resolved to
give you half a dozen chapters instead of
one; and here you have the result of this resolve
in the form of a volume—and an exemplification
of the growth of great things out of
small. When I tell you, that the task of writing
it has afforded me much pleasure, I know I
furnish you with a motive to bear patiently the
task of reading it. My wife, too, has been
highly amused with the productions of “my
book,” as she calls it. She has indeed contributed
to it. The proper names are all testimonials
of her genius for fiction. She claims
to have supplied, besides, useful hints, and
even to have made several important corrections:
most of these claims, however, are questionable.
You will be wrong if you ascribe
to her any portion of my character. I alone
am answerable for the liberties which in that
picture fiction has taken with fact. Whatever
difficulty you may have in discerning the proportions
in which they are mingled, you will
have none when I tell you that you have a
sincere friend in

“P. S. How soon shall we see you again in
this part of Maryland? Alfred asks often
when you are coming back. His partiality
for you is owing chiefly, I believe, to his triumphs
over you in geography.”