PREFACE TO THE READER IN THE BRITISH ISLANDS--"Specimen Days in
America"
London Edition, _June 1887_ If you will only take the following pages,
as you do some long and gossippy letter written for you by a relative or
friend travelling through distant scenes and incidents and jotting
them down lazily and informally, but ever veraciously (with occasional
diversion of critical thought about sombody or something,) it might
remove all formal or literary impediments at once, and bring you and me
closer together in the spirt in which the jottings were collated to
be read. You have had, and have, plenty of public events and facts
and general statistics of America;--in the following book is a common
individual New World _private life_, its birth and growth, its struggles
for a living, its goings and comings and observations (or representative
portions of them) amid the United States of America the last thirty or
forty years, with their varied war and peace, their local coloring, the
unavoidable egotism, and the lights and shades and sights and joys and
pains and sympathies common to humanity. Further introductory light may
be found in the paragraph, "A Happy Hour's Command," and the bottom note
belonging to it at the beginning of the book. I have said in the text
that if I were required to give good reason-for-being of "Specimen
Days," I should be unable to do so. Let me fondly hope that it has at
least the reason and excuse of such off-hand gossippy letter as just
alluded to, portraying American life-sights and incidents as they
actually occurred--their presentation, making additions as far as it
goes, to the simple experience and association of your soul, from a
comrade soul;--and that also, in the volume, as below any page of mine,
anywhere, ever remains, for seen or unseen basis-phrase, GOOD-WILL
BETWEEN THE COMMON PEOPLE OF ALL NATIONS.