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