who represented the great mercantile house of Im Hoff on the Fondaco, and
who ultimately died in the City of St. Mark. When that famous firm was
broken up the papers were separated from their cover and had finally
fallen into the hands of the curiosity dealer of whom I bought them. And
after surviving travels on land, risk of fire, the ravages of worms and
the ruthlessness of man for four centuries, they finally fell a prey to
the destructive fury of the waves; but my memory served me well as to the
contents, and at my bidding was at once ready to aid me in restoring the
narrative I had read. The copied portions were a valuable aid, and
imagination was able to fill the gaps; and though it failed, no doubt, to
reproduce Margery Schopper's memoirs phrase for phrase and word for word,
I have on the whole succeeded in transcribing with considerable
exactitude all that she herself had thought worthy to be rescued from
oblivion. Moreover I have avoided the repetition of the mode of talk in
the fifteenth century, when German was barely commencing to be used as a
written language, since scholars, writers, and men of letters always
chose the Latin tongue for any great or elegant intellectual work. The
narrator's expressions would only be intelligible to a select few, and,
I should have done my Margery injustice, had I left the ideas and
descriptions, whose meaning I thoroughly understood, in the clumsy form
she had given them. The language of her day is a mirror whose uneven
surface might easily reflect the fairest picture in blurred or distorted
out lines to modern eyes. Much, indeed which most attracted me in her
descriptions will have lost its peculiar charm in mine; as to whether I
have always supplemented her correctly, that must remain an open
question.

I have endeavored to throw myself into the mind and spirit of my Margery
and repeat her tale with occasional amplification, in a familiar style,
yet with such a choice of words as seems suitable to the date of her