incident is strictly true: nothing, in that respect, has been altered;
nor, indeed, anywhere except in the conversations, of which, though the
results and general outline are known, the separate details have
necessarily been lost under the agitating circumstances which produced
them. It has been judged right and delicate to conceal the name of the
great city, and therefore of the nation in which these events occurred,
chiefly out of consideration for the descendants of one person
concerned in the narrative: otherwise, it might not have been
requisite: for it is proper to mention, that every person directly a
party to the case has been long laid in the grave: all of them, with
one solitary exception, upwards of fifty years.

* * * * *

It was early spring in the year 17--; the day was the 6th of April; and
the weather, which had been of a wintry fierceness for the preceding
six or seven weeks--cold indeed beyond anything known for many years,
gloomy for ever, and broken by continual storms--was now by a Swedish
transformation all at once bright, genial, heavenly. So sudden and so
early a prelusion of summer, it was generally feared, could not last.
But that only made every body the more eager to lose no hour of an
enjoyment that might prove so fleeting. It seemed as if the whole
population of the place, a population among the most numerous in
Christendom, had been composed of hybernating animals suddenly awakened
by the balmy sunshine from their long winter's torpor. Through every
hour of the golden morning the streets were resonant with female
parties of young and old, the timid and the bold, nay, even of the most
delicate valetudinarians, now first tempted to lay aside their wintry
clothing together with their fireside habits, whilst the whole rural
environs of our vast city, the woodlands, and the interminable meadows