My friend, into whose hands I hope that all these manuscripts of mine will passone day, of this one I have something to say to you.
A long while ago I jotted down in it the history of the events that it detailswith more or less completeness. This I did for my own satisfaction. You willhave noted how memory fails us as we advance in years; we recollect, with analmost painful exactitude, what we experienced and saw in our youth, but thehappenings of our middle life slip away from us or become blurred, like astretch of low-lying landscape overflowed by grey and nebulous mist. Far offthe sun still seems to shine upon the plains and hills of adolescence and earlymanhood, as yet it shines about us in the fleeting hours of our age, thatground on which we stand to-day, but the valley between is filled with fog.Yes, even its prominences, which symbolise the more