Indignation at my dedicating this book to you will be useless, since I
am at present three thousand miles out of your reach. Moreover, this
dedication is not intended as a public monument to our friendship;――I
know too much for that. If that were the case, we should manage to
quarrel even at this distance, I am quite confident, before the
proof-sheets had left the press. But I can dedicate it to you alone of
all my college friends, because you and I were brought so especially
into the atmosphere of the man who inspired me to undertake it,――the
man to whom, under God, I shall owe most of what grace and culture
I may ever acquire. You and I know his wonderful unselfishness, his
tender sympathy, his exquisite delicacy of thought and life, as well as
others know his wit and his scholarship. It was while I was writing the
opening pages of this story that the news of his death came. It was
while my work was but half finished, that I was called away to the most
remote and wildest portions of this great country of ours, and thus has
my story become a sketch,――a bare outline of what I intended.
But, such as it is, you and a few others will know what I mean by it;
and that point gained, the rest matters little. If by it one single
heart is made to throb, even for an instant, with love of this country,
of which we can never be too mindful nor too proud, my object will be
gained. And now I commend to you this book.
Ever your friend,