The earlier history of a human being’s life is engraved upon his mind as with a pen of steel. After one comes to what are termed years of discretion, the soul is not so impressionable, and events must be of more than usual interest to be very long remembered. The story, then, of a chequered life cannot be told with even a hopeful attempt at minuteness, unless a log has been kept day after day and year after year; and my opinion is, that although diaries are often most religiously commenced, especially about New Year’s time, they are seldom if ever kept up very long.
My own adventures, and the scenes I passed through in the first stages of my existence, were not, as the reader already knows, of a kind to be very easily forgotten, even had my mind never been very impressionable. It was easy enough, therefore, to record them in some kind of chronological form.
The few adventures I and my friend Ben Roberts tell in the pages that follow, and our sketches of life, are given as they occur to our memory; often brought back to our minds by the incidents of our present everyday life.
But I do not think that even if Ben and I live as long as Old Parr, we shall either tire of spinning our yarns, or fall short of subject matter.
Let me say a word or two about the place I live in now, and where Ben so often pays me a visit.
We call it Rowan Tree Villa.
It stands mid-way up a well-wooded hill, about two and a half miles from a dreamy, drowsy old village, in one of the dreamiest, drowsiest nooks of bonnie, tree-clad Berkshire.
The top of the hill is covered by tall-stemmed pine trees, and from this eminence you can see, stretching far away below, all the undulating country, the fertile valley of the Thames, and the river itself winding for many and many a mile through it—a silver thread amidst the green.
From the top of this hill, too, if you take the trouble to climb it, you can have a bird’s-eye view of Rowan Tree Villa.