ts which
have little bearing on the main story, or whose catastrophes are veiled
in obscurity. But I would humbly ask, Are not these exactly the very
traits of real life? Is not every man's course checkered with incidents,
and crossed by people who never affect his actual career? Do not things
occur every week singular enough to demand a record, and yet, to all
seeming, not in any way bearing upon our fortunes? While I need but
appeal to universal experience to corroborate me when I say that life
is little else than a long series of uncompleted adventures, I do not
employ the strongest of all argument on this occasion, and declare
that in writing my Memoirs I had no choice but to set down the whole
or nothing, because I am aware that some sceptical folk would like to
imagine _me_ a shade, and _my story_ a fiction!

I am quite conscious of some inaccuracies; for aught I know, there may
be many in these pages; but I wrote most of them in very old age, away
from books, and still further away from the friends who might have
afforded me their counsel and guidance. I wrote with difficulty and
from memory,--that is, from a memory in which a fact often faded while
I transcribed it, and where it demanded all my efforts to call up
the incidents, without, at the same time, summoning a dozen others,
irrelevant and unwarranted.

These same pages, with all their faults, have been a solace to many a
dreary hour, when, alone and companionless, I have sat in the stillness
of a home that no footsteps resound in, and by a hearth where none
confronts me. They would be still richer in comfort if I thought they
could cheer some heart lonely as my own, and make pain or sorrow forget
something of its sting. I scarcely dare to hope for this, but I _wish_
it heartily! And if there be aught of presumption in the thought, pray
set it down amongst the other errors and short-comings of

Jasper Carew.

Palazzo Guidotte, Senegaqlia, Jan. 1855.

CHAPTER I. SOME "NOTICES OF MY FATHER AND MOTHER"

It has sometimes occurred to me that the great suits of armor we see in
museums, the huge helmets that come down like extinguishers on the penny
candles of modern humanity, the enormous cuirasses and gigantic iron
gloves, were neither more nor less than downright and deliberate cheats
practised by the "Gents" of those days for the especial humbugging of
us, their remote posterity. It might, indeed, seem a strange and absurd
thing that any people sh