'Ah! old men's boots don't go there, sir!' said the bootmaker to me one
day, as he pointed to the toes of a pair I had just brought him for
mending. It was a significant observation, I thought; and as I went on
my way home, writing another such chronicle with every springing step,
it filled me with much reflection--largely of the nature of platitude, I
have little doubt: such reflection, Reader, as is even already, I doubt
less, rippling the surface of your mind with ever-widening circles. Yes!
you sigh with an air, it is in the unconscious autobiographies we are
every moment writing--not those we publish in two volumes and a
supplement--where the truth about us is hid. Truly it is a thought that
has 'thrilled dead bosoms,' I agree, but why be afraid of it for that,
Reader? Truth is not become a platitude only in our day. 'The Preacher'
knew it for such some considerable time ago, and yet he did not fear to
'write and set in order many proverbs.'

You have kept a diary for how many years? Thirty? dear me! But have you
kept your wine-bills? If you ever engage me to write that life, which,
of course, must some day be written--I wouldn't write it myself--don't
trouble about your diary. Lend me your private ledger. 'There the action
lies in his true nature.'

Yet I should hardly, perhaps, have evoked this particular corollary from
that man of leather's observation, if I had not chanced one evening to
come across those old book-bills of my friend Narcissus, about which I
have undertaken to write here, and been struck--well-nigh awe-struck--by
the wonderful manner in which there lay revealed in them the story of
the years over which they ran. To a stranger, I am sure, they would be
full of meaning; but to me, who lived so near him through so much of the
time, how truly pregnant does each briefest entry seem.