I have just had a conversation with my publisher, which greatly disturbs me.
He tells me that all this talk about limiting the edition to a dozen copies is midsummer madness,—where am I to come in? said he, using the language of the period,—and that he intends to print as many copies as he pleases. So everything is upset. And I shall have to recast my entire work, which, you must know, is already, with the exception of this first chapter, finished and ready for the printer, down to the last semicolon. For, as it stands, my boy, everything I say is addressed to you only; and my book may be compared to a telephone with a private wire three hundred years long. But since my publisher is going to give the general public the right to hook on and hear what I am saying, it is extremely probable that my monologue will be very often interrupted. Whenever, therefore, you find me suddenly ceasing to speak to you personally, and, after a word with my contemporaries, dropping back to our private wire, you may be sure that there has been a “Hello?” and a “Who’s that?” and a “Well, good-by!” somewhere along a cross-line.
10.
And this is the thing that I feel that I have to say:
I would tell you something of the land of your forefathers. Something of Virginia. Not new Virginia,—not West Virginia,—but the Old Dominion and her people, such as they were when Plancus was consul. And, first of all, I will tell you why I have thought it worth while to lay the following sketches before you.
11.
The world, in my day, is full of unrest. Everywhere anxious care and the eager struggle for wealth. Mr. Spencer’s Gospel of Recreation finds few adherents, and the Genius of Repose seems to have winged its way to other spheres.
And I fear matters will be worse in your day; and, just as one, on a broiling July afternoon, looks with a real, though evanescent, pleasure upon pictured polar bears gambolling amid icebergs (in the show-window of a soda-water shop), so I cannot but think that it would be a genuine boon to you could I but lead you for an hour from out the dust and heat and turmoil of your life and bid you cease striving for a little while, while I (I, too, forgetting for a moment that every crust must be fought for), while I reproduce from out the cool caves of my memory certain scenes that I have witnessed.
True, some of them I have not seen with my own eyes, but Charley has, or else Alice, which is just as well.