A JANGLING OF AN ANTIQUATED BELL.





Preface



`Historicus nascitur, non fit.' I am painfully aware that neither
my calling nor election in this matter are the least sure. Certain it is
that in youth, when alone the historian or the horseman may be formed,
I did little to fit myself for writing history. Wandering about
the countries of which now I treat, I had almost as little object
in my travels as a Gaucho of the outside `camps'. I never took a note
on any subject under heaven, nor kept a diary, by means of which,
my youth departed and the countries I once knew so well transmogrified,
I could, sitting beside the fire, read and enjoy the sadness of revisiting,
in my mind's eye, scenes that I now remember indistinctly as in a dream.
I take it that he who keeps a journal of his doings, setting down day by day
all that he does, with dates and names of places, their longitude and latitude
duly recorded, makes for himself a meal of bitter-sweet;
and that your truest dulcamara is to read with glasses the faded notes
jotted down hurriedly in rain, in sun, in wind, in camps,
by flooded rivers, and in the long and listless hours of heat --
in fact, to see again your life, as it were, acted for you
in some camera obscura, with the chief actor changed. But diaries,
unless they be mere records of bare facts, must of necessity,
as in their nature they are autobiographical, be false guides;