se that any overweening confidence in my literary powers would
have emboldened me to make this reply; my whole strength lay in the fact
that I could not recognize anything like literary effort in the matter. If
the world would only condescend to read that which I wrote precisely as I
was in the habit of talking, nothing could be easier than for me to occupy
them. Not alone was it very easy to me, but it was intensely interesting
and amusing to myself, to be so engaged.

The success of Harry Lorrequer had been freely wafted across the German
ocean, but even in its mildest accents it was very intoxicating incense to
me; and I set to work on my second book with a thrill of hope as regards
the world's favor which--and it is no small thing to say it--I can yet
recall.

I can recall, too, and I am afraid more vividly still, some of the
difficulties of my task when I endeavored to form anything like an accurate
or precise idea of some campaigning incident or some passage of arms from
the narratives of two distinct and separate "eye-witnesses." What mistrust
I conceived for all eye-witnesses from my own brief experience of their
testimonies! What an impulse did it lend me to study the nature and the
temperament of narrator, as indicative of the peculiar coloring he might
lend his narrative; and how it taught me to know the force of the French
epigram that has declared how it was entirely the alternating popularity of
Marshal Soult that decided whether he won or lost the battle of Toulouse.

While, however, I was sifting these evidences, and separating, as well as
I might, the wheat from the chaff, I was in a measure training myself for
what, without my then knowing it, was to become my career in life. This was
not therefore altogether without a certain degree of labor, but so light
and pleasant withal, so full of picturesque peeps at character and humorous
views of human nature, that it would be the very rankest ingratitude of me
if I did not own that I gained all my earlier experiences of the world in
very pleasant company,--highly enjoyable at the time, and with matter for
charming souvenirs long after.

That certain traits of my acquaintances found themselves embodied in some
of the characters of this story I do not to deny. The principal of natural
selection adapts itself to novels as to Nature, and it would have demanded
an effort above my strength to have disabused myself at the desk of all
the impressions of the dinner