University of Virginia Library

TO
HENRY A. BULLARD, ESQ.

The idea of the following work was suggested by
conversations with you. In the spring time of your
days, and when fresh from our common Alma Mater,
as a patriot soldier of fortune, you surveyed the region
over which my hero travels, and became familiar with
the country, its language, and manners. You well know,
that no inconsiderable portion of these adventures is
any thing, rather than fiction. If it have any interest,
then, it is but right that the community should know to
whom they owe the germ and the fruit. In affixing your
name to the work, I rejoice in the offered opportunity
to testify my wish to raise a monument to the remembrance
of friendship, and kindness, and an unbroken
series of good offices from the first hour of our acquaintance.
I leave to others the cold and unmeaning
homage of indiscriminate culogy, and confine myself to
terms more in keeping with the color of our intimate,

endeared, and, to me, most useful and improving intercourse.
It is one of the cordials, that have sustained
me in sickness, and have tended to make me feel as if
domesticated in a land of strangers. It has called up
affecting and tender recollections of events, and years,
and men gone by, and `beyond the flood,' and of an
intimacy of fourteen years with your deceased father.
The Bible bids you not to forget your own friend and
your father's friend. I am sure that you will obey
the injunction; and I conclude with the hope and the
prayer, that the chain, whose links have thus been
forming for two generations, will descend, lengthening
and unbroken, to embrace our children in its golden
circle.