_First_, then, as to ourself. I say not myself; for this would be to roll immediately my complex egoism out of the manifold garments which a historian wears of course; but I say Ourself, that gathered, round Impersonation which may be well supposed to be a crystallized something, like a cunning frost-work on the long window-panes of history,—an armless hand writing _Mene_ and other hieroglyphics on the wall, or a Briareus with his hundred hands, heads, and feet, running in a hundred different ways, staring through a hundred telescopes at the calm ages, and writing with a century of hands the doings, undoings, and misdoings of the race. This manifold, dignified mystery I mean to put on and wear after this chapter; but in order to insure the confidence which I now seek, I shall slip, for a few minutes, out of my state gear, and taking your hand,—now no longer withheld nor even hesitatingly given,—look trustingly into your eyes, and mention a few of those particulars of myself, which you have a gracious right to know, in order to judge of my standing in the world, my intellectual competency and fitness, and the plumptitude of my moral proportions. I was born very early in life; so early, in fact, that although present, and making such an effort as befitted my first appearance, I was so inexpressibly interested in the matter, that I forgot my future office, that of recorder of passing events. The fact of my birth—a fact which is apt to happen to most people—is not perhaps so singular as that, being born in the United States, I contrived to live beyond the first five years, that fatal semi-decade. I ought, perhaps, now to add, in order to quiet any apprehensions after my last alarming remark, that “I still live”; and that, having survived the perils and plums of parental kindness in infancy, I hope to outlive the equally fatal neglect and indifference which marks our treatment of old age. My parents, at the time I was given to the world, were poor, and, therefore, not respectable. They had been simple enough to marry young, and for love; and although they had mated each other well, they had failed to put a yoke upon the neck of fortune. These early struggles, however, stiffened in them the moral elements, and marbleized, so to speak, the soft woods of their country natures, making a substance very different from that thin, moral veneering which is upholstered from the beechen groves that timber the sunny slopes of life. Both of them were Presbyterians; always attending the Sunday services, sitting in a gallery seat, close to the pulpit, and so taking the brunt of the hard blows which were rightfully felt in, and—I sometimes thought—spent themselves upon, our uncushioned pew.