TO MY WIFE AND CHILDREN, FOR WHOM THESE MEMORIES OF MANY YEARS HAVE BEEN RECORDED, I DEDICATE MY BOOK Now that the midnight of life is at hand, before the last chime of the curfew must ring out, I have been busying myself in writing down memories of the people who brightened its morning, its noon and its evening. It was my fate long ago to be associated with men older, sometimes much older, than myself, and so it happens that few indeed of the friends of my early manhood are now left. Except where it is absolutely necessary in order to tell the rest of my tale, I have not dealt with the living. To praise them might seem sycophantic, to blame them an impertinence. It would be overbold in me …
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