in the exaggerations of the ego. But neither
fear of the charge of self-exploitation nor the specter of a modesty
oft too obtrusive to be real shall deter me from a proper freedom of
narration, where, though in the main but a humble chronicler, I must
needs appear upon the scene and speak of myself; for I at least have not
always been a dummy and have sometimes in a way helped to make history.

In my early life--as it were, my salad days--I aspired to becoming what
old Simon Cameron called "one of those damned literary fellows" and
Thomas Carlyle less profanely described as "a leeterary celeebrity."
But some malign fate always sat upon my ambitions in this regard. It was
easy to become The National Gambler in Nast's cartoons, and yet easier
The National Drunkard through the medium of the everlasting mint-julep
joke; but the phantom of the laurel crown would never linger upon my
fair young brow.

Though I wrote verses for the early issues of Harper's Weekly--happily
no one can now prove them on me, for even at that jejune period I had
the prudence to use an anonym--the Harpers, luckily for me, declined to
publish a volume of my poems. I went to London, carrying with me "the
great American novel." It was actually accepted by my ever too partial
friend, Alexander Macmillan. But, rest his dear old soul, he died
and his successors refused to see the transcendent merit of that
performance, a view which my own maturing sense of belles-lettres values
subsequently came to verify.

When George Harvey arrived at the front I "'ad 'opes." But, Lord, that
cast-iron man had never any bookish bowels of compassion--or political
either for the matter of that!--so that finally I gave up fiction and
resigned myself to the humble category of the crushed tragi-comedians of
literature, who inevitably drift into journalism.

Thus my destiny has been casual. A great man of letters quite thwarted,
I became a newspaper reporter--a voluminous space writer for the
press--now and again an editor and managing editor--until, when I was
nearly thirty years of age, I hit the Kentucky trail and set up for a
journalist. I did this, however, with a big "J," nursing for a while
some faint ambitions of statesmanship--even office--but in the end
discarding everything that might obstruct my entire freedom, for I came
into the world an insurgent, or, as I have sometimes described myself in
the Kentucky vernacular, "a free nigger and not a slave nigger."