That is our apology—ours who are old—for this business of writing memoirs. You may, if you will, be content to read of us only what you will read in scrappy histories, but you will lose the sense of your own value in doing so: you will be like one who picks up a _feuilleton_ at its twentieth chapter, with no more preparation than such as is offered by the editor’s synopsis of previous events: or like one who strolls in when the third act of a drama is being played, and will have his friends whisper a brief summary to put him _au fait_ with the plot. We are Act 1 of the drama, you are Act 3; without us, you cannot understand yourselves. You must follow in detail, as it unfolds itself, the development of the times you sprang from, if you would taste the full savour of the times into which you sprang. You will accuse our retrospect of partiality and of false perspective: “All was not so rosy,” you will be tempted to say, “as grateful memory has pictured it, you have represented the exceptional as the typical, the typical as the exceptional; hard outlines have become blurred for you, and shadows, in their turn, taken substance.” Well, we do our best; we are fogeys, perhaps, and sentimentalists, but you will do well to take our depositions and sift them for yourselves. One day you will be old, and you too will want to write memoirs; and you too will find that to recall the past is arduous, that modern ways of thinking and _ex post facto_ judgments of value impose themselves upon your mind, and make you despair of the true estimate and the adequate phrase. And you will find that, however unclouded your own faculty of retrospect, you will search in vain for that magic touch which would interpret the past for your younger contemporaries, take them back with you and make them see it with your eyes, your presuppositions. If you could be now what you will be then, though it be farther than ever removed from the old days of which this book is a remembrancer, you would be more disposed to bear an old woman’s day-dreams with patience, and allow for her where she has exaggerated, and pardon her where she has erred. MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE CHAPTER I CHILDHOOD Why was I born, ye Fates, and why, Being born, did I not die? JAMES PHILPOT: _The Unanswered Question_.