1860-63.
[The following diary was originally written in lead pencil and in a book
the leaves of which were too soft to take ink legibly. I have it direct
from the hands of its writer, a lady whom I have had the honor to know for
nearly thirty years. For good reasons the author's name is omitted, and
the initials of people and the names of places are sometimes fictitiously
given. Many of the persons mentioned were my own acquaintances and
friends. When some twenty years afterwards she first resolved to publish
it, she brought me a clear, complete copy in ink. It had cost much
trouble, she said, for much of the pencil writing had been made under such
disadvantages and was so faint that at times she could decipher it only
under direct sunlight. She had succeeded, however, in making a copy,
_verbatim_ except for occasional improvement in the grammatical form of a
sentence, or now and then the omission, for brevity's sake, of something
unessential. The narrative has since been severely abridged to bring it
within the limits of this volume.
In reading this diary one is much charmed with its constant understatement
of romantic and perilous incidents and conditions. But the original
penciled pages show that, even in copying, the strong bent of the writer
to be brief has often led to the exclusion of facts that enhance the
interest of exciting situations, and sometimes the omission robs her own
heroism of due emphasis. I have restored one example of this in the short
paragraph following her account of the night she spent fanning her sick
husband on their perilous voyage down the Mississippi.]