THE AUTHOR TO THE CONFIDENTIAL EDITOR.
MY DEAR ED.,—
I really wouldn't undertake to tell an "imaginary" story, or to write a romance, or anything of the kind. I might be willing to relate some curious matters that have come to my knowledge, arranging them in a collective form, so that they would probably pass with most readers for fictitious, and perhaps excite very much the same kind of interest they would if genuine fictions. I don't remember much about the "last war"; but I suppose both of us may recollect the illumination when peace was declared in 1815.
Ever yours.
THE PUBLISHERS TO THE AUTHOR.
(Inclosing a check, in advance, for the first number.)
THE AUTHOR TO THE READER.
Finding myself in possession of certain facts which possess interest sufficient to warrant their publication, I am led to ask myself whether I shall put them in the form of a narrative. There are, evidently, two sides to this question. In the first place, I have a number of friends who write me letters, and tell me openly to my face, that they want me to go on writing. It doesn't make much difference to them, they say, what I write about,—only they want me to keep going. They have got used to seeing me, in one shape or another,—and I am a kind of habit with them, like a nap after dinner. They tell me not to be frightened about it,—to begin as dull as I like, and that I shall warm up, by-and-by, as old Dutchman used to, who could hardly put one leg before the other when he started, but, after a while, got so limbered and straightened out by his work, that he dropped down into the forties, and, I think they say, into the thirties. L'appétit vient en mangeant, one of them said who talks French,—which, you know, means, that eating makes one hungry. I remember, when I sat down to that last book of mine, which you may perhaps have read, although I had the facts of the story, of course, all in my head, it seemed to me that I should never have the patience to tell them all; and yet, before I was through, I got so full of the scenes and characters I was talking about, that I had to bolt my door and lay in an extra bandanna, before I could trust myself to put my recollections and thoughts on paper. You don't expect a locomotive is going to start off with a train of thirty or forty thousand passengers, without straining a little,—do you? That isn't the way; but this is. Puff! The wheels begin to turn, but very slowly. Papas hold up their little Johnnys to the car-windows to be kissed. Puff——Puff! People shake hands from the platform to the cars, walking along by their side. Puff—puff—puff! Now, then, Ma'am! pass out that tumbler pretty spry, out of which you have been swallowing that eternal "drink o' wotter," to which the human female of a certain social grade is so odiously addicted. Puff, puff, puff, puff! Too late, old gentleman I unless you can do a mile in a good deal less than three minutes, carrying weight, in the shape of a valise in one hand and a carpet-bag in the other. That's the way with anything that's got any freight to carry. It's slow when it sets out;—but steam is steam,—and what's bred in the boiler will show in the driving-wheel, sooner or later.
If I had to make up a story, now, it would be a very different matter. I could never conceive how some of those romancers go to work, in cold blood, to draw, out of what they call their imagination, a parcel of impossible events and absurd characters. That is not my trouble; for I have come into relation with a series of persons and events which will save me the pains of drawing on my invention, in case I shall see fit to follow the counsel of my too partial friends. I am only afraid I should not disguise the circumstances enough, if I were to arrange these facts in the narrative form. Some of them are of such a nature, that they cannot be supposed to have happened more than once in the experience of a generation; and I feel that the greatest caution and delicacy are necessary in the manner of their presentation, not to offend the living or wrong the memory of the dead.
It is very easy for you, the Reader, to sit down and run over the pages of a monthly narrative as a boy "skips" a stone,—and the flatter and thinner your capacity, the more skips, perhaps, you will make. But I tell you, for a man who has live people to deal with, and hearts that are beating even while he handles them,—a man who can go into families and pull up by the roots all the mysteries of their dead generations and their living sons' and daughters' secret history,—responsible for what he says, here and elsewhere,—open to a libel suit, if he isn't pretty careful in his personalities, or to a visit from a brother or other relative, wishing to know, Sir, and so forth,—or to a paragraph in the leading journal of that whispering-gallery of a nation's gossip, Little Millionville, to the effect that—We understand the personages alluded to in the tale now publishing in the Oceanic Miscellany are the Reverend Dr. S—-h and his accomplished lady, the distinguished financier, Mr. B—-n,—and so through the whole list of characters;—I say, for a man who writes the pages you skim over, it is a mighty different piece of business. Why, if I do tell all I know about some things that have come to my cognizance, I shall make you open your eyes and spread your pupils, as if you had been to the Eye Infirmary, and the doctors there had anointed your lids with the extract of belladonna. Mark what I tell you! I have happened to become intimately acquainted with circumstances of a very extraordinary nature,—not, perhaps, without precedent, but such as very few have been called upon to witness. Suppose that I should see fit to tell these in connection with the story of which they form a part? I may render myself obnoxious to persons whom it is not safe to offend,—persons that won't come out in the public prints, perhaps, but will poke incendiary letters under your doors,—that won't step up to you in broad daylight, and lug a Colt out of their pocket, or draw a bowie-knife from their back, where they had carried it under their coat, but who will dog you about to do you a mischief unseen,—who will carry air-guns in the shape of canes, and hang round the place where you get your provisions, and practise with long-range rifles out in the lonely fields,—rifles that crack no louder than a parlor-pistol, but spit a bit of lead out of their mouths half a mile and more, so that you wait as you do for the sound of the man's axe who is chopping on the other side of the river, to see the fellow you have "saved" clap his hand to his breast and stagger over. It makes me nervous to think of such things. I don't want to be suspicious of every queer taste in my coffee, and to shiver if I see a little powdered white sugar on the upper crust of my pastry. I don't want, every time I hear a door bang, to think it is a ragged slug from an unseen gun-barrel.