fact at the time to note accurately their observations and impressions.

These thoughts occurred to me when, at the request of the editor of the
"Century," I one night took up my pen, and gathering about me old
letters, photographs, and small tokens faded and yellow with age,
plunged deep into the recollections of my youthful days, and evoked the
ghosts of brilliant friends, many of whom have since passed away,
leaving but names written in lines of blood upon a page of history. As
they appeared across a chasm of thirty years, the well-remembered faces
familiarly smiled, each flinging a memory. They formed a motley company:
generals now dead, whose names are revered or execrated by their
countrymen; lieutenants and captains who have since made their way in
the world, or have died, broken-hearted heroes, before Metz or Sedan;
women who seemed obscure, but whose names, in the general convulsion of
nations, have risen to newspaper notoriety or to lasting fame; soldiers
who have become historians; guerrilleros now pompously called generals;
adventurers who have grown into personages; personages who have sunk
into adventurers; sovereigns who have become martyrs.

They had all been laid away in my mind, buried in the ashes of the past
along with the old life. The drama in which each had played his part had
for many years seemed as far off and dim as though read in a book a long
time ago; and yet now, how alive it all suddenly became--alive with a
life that no pen can picture!

There were their photographs and their invitations, their old notes and
bits of doggerel sent to accompany small courtesies--flowers, music, a
Havana dog, or the loan of a horse. It was all vivid and real enough
now. Those men were not to me mere historical figures of whom one reads.
They fought historic battles, they founded a historic though ephemeral