The Fate: A Tale of Stirring Times

Transcriber's Notes: 1. Page scan source: Google Books https://books.google.com/books?id=IgMiAAAAMAAJ (the New York Public Library)
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and fifty-one, by
George P. R. James,
in the Office of the Clerk of the District Court of the Southern District of New York.
Change of scene I believe to be as invigorating to the mind as change of air is to the body, refreshing the weary and exhausted powers, and affording a stimulus which prompts to activity of thought. To a writer of fiction, especially, the change may be necessary, not only on account of the benefits to be derived by his own mind from the invigorating effects of a new atmosphere, but also on account of the fresh thoughts suggested by the different circumstances in which he is placed.
We are curiously-constructed creatures, not unlike the mere brute creation in many of our propensities; and the old adage, that custom is a second nature, is quite as applicable to the mind as to the body. If we ride a horse along a road to which he is accustomed, he will generally make a little struggle to stop at a house where his master has been in the habit of calling, or to turn up a by-lane through which he has frequently gone. The mind, too, especially of an author, has its houses of call and by-lanes in plenty; and, so long as it is in familiar scenes, it will have a strong hankering for its accustomed roads and pleasant halting-places. Every object around us is a sort of bough from which we gather our ideas; and it is very well, now and then, to pluck the apples of another garden, of a flavor different from our own.
Whether I have in any degree benefited by the change from one side of the Atlantic to the other--a change much greater when morally than when physically considered--it is not for me to say; but I trust that, at all events, the work which is to follow these pages will not show that I have in any degree or in any way suffered from my visit to and residence in America. I have written it with interest in the characters portrayed and the events detailed; and I humbly desire--without even venturing to hope--that I may succeed in communicating some portion of the same interest to my readers.