Fragments of an Autobiography

DEDICATED TO MY WIFE
AUTHOR OF IN BOHEMIA WITH DU MAURIER, ETC.
London JAMES NISBET & CO., LTD. 21 BERNERS STREET 1899
Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co. At the Ballantyne Press
HAVE often found it hard to read a preface; much harder do I find it to-day to write one. If I do so, it is because it gives me an opportunity of owning that I have strung these my reminiscences together most unceremoniously and unsystematically. They are to be taken only as Fragments of an Autobiography, very much on the same lines as the first volume which recorded my adventures in Bohemia with Du Maurier. If the reader, thus duly forewarned, elects to follow me over the uneven road, he will, I trust, not mind a little jolting. If, however, he judges that the gaps and omissions in my life-story are unjustifiable, he must not be surprised should I attempt to set things right in a third volume. I should be all the more inclined to do so as there are some other fragments and segments waiting to be pieced together which are connected with the brightest days of my life.
The writing of the present chapters has often been a source of genuine pleasure to me, for I say with Bolingbroke in Richard II .: I count myself in nothing else so happy as in a soul remembering my good friends.
And now that I have come to a full stop, I am left in that pleasant frame of mind in which I would fain believe in the proverbial kindness of the reader—that deity from times immemorial appealed to by the preface-writer,—a frame of mind unduly optimistic perhaps, but which emboldens me to hope that I may find some new friends amongst those who will care to read what I have to say about the old ones.
F. M.
London, February 1899 .

the terrors of a certain night when the wind was howling and the rain was beating down in torrents over the arid plains of the Lüneburger Haide; between them they had blown or blotted out the flickering lights of a heavy, lumbering travelling carriage such as one used to hire in the so-called good old times. The horses were plunging in the mire, the postillion was swearing, and a very small boy was howling. That boy was I, and the incident marks my first entrance into that conscious life which registers events in our memories. Not that I exactly remember what happened, and how we got out of the ankle-deep mud, and finally reached our destination; but I have no doubt that my father and the brother-in-law, as the German postillion was addressed in those days, had to get the wheels out of the ruts as best they could without assistance, for there was no traveller, weary or otherwise, of the regulation first-chapter pattern, to come to the rescue.