tragic, and even appalling, they are at times repulsive. And it seems
evident that, once putting himself to the cost of a wholesale fiction,
the writer would have used his privilege more freely for his own
advantage. Whereas the author of these memoirs clearly writes under the
coercion and restraint of a _notorious reality_, that would not
suffer him to ignore or to modify the leading facts. Then, as to the
objection that few people or none have an experience presenting such
uniformity of perilous adventure, a little closer attention shows that
the experience in this case is _not_ uniform; and so far otherwise,
that a period of several years in Kate's South American life is
confessedly suppressed; and on no other ground whatever than that
this long parenthesis is _not_ adventurous, not essentially
differing from the monotonous character of ordinary Spanish life.

Suppose the case, therefore, that Kate's memoirs had been thrown upon
the world with no vouchers for their authenticity beyond such internal
presumptions as would have occurred to thoughtful readers, when
reviewing the entire succession of incidents, I am of opinion that the
person best qualified by legal experience to judge of evidence would
finally have pronounced a favorable award; since it is easy to
understand that in a world so vast as the Peru, the Mexico, the Chili,
of Spaniards during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and
under the slender modification of Indian manners as yet effected by the
Papal Christianization of those countries, and in the neighborhood of a
river-system so awful, of a mountain-system so unheard-of in Europe,
there would probably, by blind, unconscious sympathy, grow up a
tendency to lawless and gigantesque ideals of adventurous life; under
which, united with the duelling code of Europe, many things would
become trivial and commonplace experiences that to us home-bred English
("_qui musas colimus severiores_") seem monstrous and revolting.