 | Hilt to hilt, or, Days and nights on the banks of the Shenandoah in the autumn of 1864 |  |
PROLOGUE.
I perform a bold exploit to-day, my dear reader.
The exploit in question is sending Hilt to Hilt
to the press.
It is a long time now since 1866, and, if you have
read, you have probably forgotten the volume entitled
Surry of Eagle's Nest.
Alas! authors must expect to be lost sight of
as the years flow on. I am not so vain as to imagine
you remember my memoirs; and, for a stronger
reason still, you must have forgotten their reception
by my critical friends of New England. They were
flayed by those fierce foemen. I recall the ceremony
with a nervous shiver. Those terrible literary
Camanches brandished the tomahawk, uttered the
war-whoop, and performed a dance of fearful triumph
around the prostrate and bleeding victim.
The unfortunate memoirs of Colonel Surry were
“highly-seasoned... duels and murderous
settlements of deadly feuds kept up the excitement”...
the author need not fear that his
portrait of Stuart would “bore any one fifty years
hence,” as nobody at that remote period would
know of the book's existence... parts were
“cribbed from Dickens”... “it might find
a good market with the `New York Ledger.”'.
.. the style was “so excessively florid, that
but for the perpetual flow of incident it would be
intolerable!”... and “the literary execution
was in that exaggerated style in which the
Southern writers so often indulge!”
All this, and more, descended on the unfortunate
Colonel Surry.
Well, that bon mot about “fifty years hence”
made me laugh. The phrases “excessively florid”
and “exaggerated style” made me reflect. Was I
then so very florid and exaggerated, as my friends
declared? I had supposed the MS. of Surry of
Eagle's Nest to have been composed in a most
compact, terse, and altogether faultless style; — and
here was a great critic, and a critic in Boston,
and exaggerated!
What to do? Alas! Surry of Eagle's Nest was
printed. The poor youth had made his entrance
into the bustling world, and the mischief was done.
I could only resolve that, in future, I would never
be florid or exaggerated any more — that I would
avoid the errours of the past: another flaying, like
that received from the Pilgrim sons of New England,
would, I felt, put an end to my career.
In the present episode of my memoirs, therefore,
good reader, which I call Hilt to Hilt, I tell a
plain and unadorned story. I hope the style is not
florid; I know the events, strange as they appear,
are not exaggerated. It is almost impossible, indeed,
to exaggerate the wild romance of that Partisan
life of 1864. I have lived in the midst of it;
seen it with my eyes; known and spoken with the
actors in it; and yet I assure you that I find
it difficult to realize that the whole was not a
dream.
Let me repeat that whatever seems strangest in
this book is substantially, when not literally, true.
There were one or two additional incidents which I
that the reader would call me a “sensation-writer.”
Here, then, worthy reader, I present you with a
brief and fierce episode in the strange life of the
Virginia border, in the autumn of 1864.
Some of the men who figured in these scenes are
dead. Others still live, and will tell you that I
exaggerate nothing.
| Hilt to hilt, or, Days and nights on the banks of the Shenandoah in the autumn of 1864 | |