to follow that life, the account of which he proceeds to give with this
preliminary word of explanation:--

"The following pages will contain a picture of my vagrant life,
intermixed with specimens, generally brief and slight, of that great
mass of fiction to which I gave existence, and which has vanished like
cloud-shapes. Besides the occasions when I sought a pecuniary reward, I
was accustomed to exercise my narrative faculty, wherever chance had
collected a little audience, idle enough to listen. These rehearsals
were useful in testing the strong points of my stories; and, indeed, the
flow of fancy soon came upon me so abundantly, that its indulgence was
its own reward; though the hope of praise, also, became a powerful
incitement. Since I shall never feel the warm gush of new thought, as I
did then, let me beseech the reader to believe, that my tales were not
always so cold as he may find them now. With each specimen will be given
a sketch of the circumstances in which the story was told. Thus my
air-drawn pictures will be set in frames, perhaps more valuable than the
pictures themselves, since they will be embossed with groups of
characteristic figures, amid the lake and mountain scenery, the villages
and fertile fields, of our native land. But I write the book for the
sake of its moral, which many a dreaming youth may profit by, though it
is the experience of a wandering story-teller."

He makes the acquaintance of another itinerant, a preacher, Eliakim
Abbott, drawn after the fashion of that crude grotesque which is found
in Hawthorne's early work, and is not without a reminiscence of Scott in
the literary handling; and the two become fellows of the road, the one
with a sermon, the other with a story, and their fortune with their
audiences is related. The only adventure of note, however, is the
appearance of the Story-Teller as an attraction of a traveling