University of Virginia Library

Preface

I make no apology for these memoirs. Now that I am near the end of life, the days of my youth come back to me like bells at evening tolling. Dear remembered faces that

rise before me, faces of men and women, of boys and girls, just as I knew them once, unchanged through all the intervening years.

In old days writers used to appeal to a more or less mythical personage called "the kind reader," yet even if he still exists, I shall not crave his indulgence, unless perchance he happens to be one of the few survivors who has it in his power to question my veracity.