In the Sixties

CONTENTS

In nothing else under the latter-day sun-not even in the mysterious department of woman’s attire-has Fashion been more variable, or more eccentric in its variations, than in the matter of prefaces. The eternal revolution of letters devours its own children so rapidly that for the hardiest of them ten years count as a generation; each succeeding decade has whims of its own about prefaces. Now it has been the rule to make them long and didactic, and now brief and with a twist toward flippancy. Upon occasion it has been thought desirable to throw upon this introductory formula the responsibility of explaining everything that was to follow in the book, and, again, nothing has seemed further from the proper function of a preface than elucidation of any sort. Sometimes the prevalent mode has discouraged prefaces altogether—and thus it happens that the present author, doomed to be doing in England at least something of what the English do, has never before chanced to write one. Yet now it seems that in America prefaces are much in vogue-and this is an American edition.
The apology of the exile ends abruptly, however, with this confession that the preface is strange ground. The four volumes under comment were all, it is true, written in England, but they do not belong to the Old World in any other sense.
In three of them the very existence of Europe is scarcely so much as hinted at. The fourth concerns itself, indeed, with events in which Europeans took an active part; but what they were doing, on the one side and on the other, was in its results very strictly American.
The idea which finally found shape and substance in this last-named book, “In the Valley,” seems now in retrospect to have been always in my mind. All four of my great-grandfathers had borne arms in the Revolutionary War, and one of them indeed somewhat indefinitely expanded this record by fighting on both sides. My earliest recollections are of tales told by my grandmother about local heroes of this conflict, who were but middle-aged people when she was a child. She herself had come into curious relation with one of the terrible realities of that period. At the age of six it was her task to beat linen upon the stones of a brook running through the Valley farm upon which she was reared, and the deep-hole close beside where she worked was the spot in which the owner of the farm had lain hidden in the alders, immersed to his chin, for two days and nights while Brant’s Indians were looking for him. Thus, by a single remove, I came myself into contact with the men who held Tryon County against the King, and my boyish head was full of them. Before I left school, at the age of twelve, I had composed several short but lurid introductions to a narrative which should have for its central feature the battle of Oriskany; for the writing of one of these, indeed, or rather for my contumacy in refusing to give up my manuscript to the teacher when my crime was detected, I was expelled from the school.