Project Gutenberg's Fragments of an Autobiography, by Felix Moscheles

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Title: Fragments of an Autobiography

Author: Felix Moscheles

Release Date: July 16, 2010 [EBook #33185]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Fragments of an Autobiography

DEDICATED TO MY WIFE

[Illustration: Charlotte Moscheles]

Fragments
of an
Autobiography

BY
FELIX MOSCHELES
AUTHOR OF "IN BOHEMIA WITH DU MAURIER," ETC.

London
JAMES NISBET & CO., LTD.
21 BERNERS STREET
1899

Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
At the Ballantyne Press

PREFACE

I have often found it hard to read a preface; much harder do I find it
to-day to write one. If I do so, it is because it gives me an
opportunity of owning that I have strung these my reminiscences together
most unceremoniously and unsystematically. They are to be taken only as
"Fragments of an Autobiography," very much on the same lines as the
first volume which recorded my adventures in Bohemia with Du Maurier. If
the reader, thus duly forewarned, elects to follow me over the uneven
road, he will, I trust, not mind a little jolting. If, however, he
judges that the gaps and omissions in my life-story are unjustifiable,
he must not be surprised should I attempt to set things right in a third
volume. I should be all the more inclined to do so as there are some
other fragments and segments waiting to be pieced together which are
connected with the brightest days of my life.

The writing of the present chapters has often been a source of genuine
pleasure to me, for I say with Bolingbroke in _Richard II_.: "I count
myself in nothing else so happy as in a soul remembering my good
friends."

And now that I have come to a full stop, I am left in that pleasant
frame of mind in which I would fain believe in the proverbial kindness
of the reader--that deity from times immemorial appealed to by the
preface-writer,--a frame of