CHAPTER I


Three chapters in the story of my life--three periods, distinct and
well defined, yet consecutive--beginning when I had not completed
twenty-five years and finishing before thirty, will probably prove the
most eventful of all. To the very end they will come back oftenest to
memory and seem more vivid than all the other years of existence--the
four-and-twenty I had already lived, and the, say, forty or
forty-five--I hope it may be fifty or even sixty--which are to follow.
For what soul in this wonderful, various world would wish to depart
before ninety! The dark as well as the light, its sweet and its bitter,
make me love it.

Of the first of these three a word only need be written. This was the
period of courtship and matrimony; and though the experience seemed
to me then something altogether new and strange in the world, it must
nevertheless have resembled that of other men, since all men marry.
And the last period, which was the longest of the three, occupying
fully three years, could not be told. It was all black disaster. Three
years of enforced separation and the extremest suffering which the
cruel law of the land allowed an enraged father to inflict on his child
and the man who had ventured to wed her against his will. Even the
wise may be driven mad by oppression, and I that was never wise, but
lived in and was led by the passions and illusions and the unbounded
self-confidence of youth, what must it have been for me when we were
cruelly torn asunder; when I was cast into prison to lie for long
months in the company of felons, ever thinking of her who was also