As an accompaniment to this portrait, your wish is that I should furnish a few brief chronological memoranda of my own life. _That_ would be hard for me to do, and, _when_ done, might not be very interesting for others to read. Nothing makes such dreary and monotonous reading as the old hackneyed roll-call, chronologically arrayed, of inevitable facts in a man's life. One is so certain of the man's having been born, and also of his having died, that it is dismal to lie under the necessity of reading it. That the man began by being a boy--that he went to school--and that, by intense application to his studies, "which he took to be _his_ portion in this life," he rose to distinction as a robber of orchards, seems so probable, upon the whole, that I am willing to accept it as a postulate. That he married--that, in fullness of time, he was hanged, or (being a humble, unambitious man) that he was content with deserving it--these little circumstances are so naturally to be looked for, as sown broadcast up and down the great fields of biography, that any one life becomes, in this respect, but the echo of thousands. Chronologic successions of events and dates, such as these, which, belonging to the race, illustrate nothing in the individual, are as wearisome as they are useless. A better plan will be--to detach some single chapter from the experiences of childhood, which is likely to offer, at least, this kind of value--either that it will record some of the deep impressions under which my childish sensibilities expanded, and the ideas which at that time brooded continually over my mind, or else will expose the traits of character that slumbered in those around me. This plan will have the advantage of not being liable to the suspicion of vanity or egotism; for I beg the reader to understand distinctly, that I do not offer this sketch as deriving any part of what interest it may have from myself, as the person concerned in it. If the particular experience selected is really interesting, in virtue of its own circumstances, then it matters not to _whom_ it happened. Suppose that a man should record a perilous journey, it will be no fair inference that he records it as a journey performed by himself. Most sincerely he may be able to say, that he records it not _for_ that relation to himself, but _in spite of_ that relation. The incidents, being absolutely independent, in their power to amuse, of all personal reference, must be equally interesting [he will say] whether they occurred to A or to B. That is _my_ case. Let the reader abstract from _me_ as a person that by accident, or in some partial sense, may have been previously known to himself. Let him read the sketch as belonging to one who wishes to be profoundly anonymous. I offer it not as owing any thing to its connection with a particular individual, but as likely to be amusing separately for itself; and if I make any mistake in _that_, it is not a mistake of vanity exaggerating