The Road to Paris: A Story of Adventure Read online

  INTRODUCTION.

  "With our company of riflemen that marched in Arnold's army through theMaine wilderness to attack Quebec, there was a sergeant's wife, a largeand sturdy woman, no common camp-follower, but decent and respected, whoone day, when the troops started to wade through a freezing pond, ofwhich they broke the thin ice coating with the butts of their guns,calmly lifted her skirts above her waist and strode in, and so kept thegreater part of her clothes dry in crossing. Not a man of us made ajest, or even grinned, so natural was her action in the circumstances. Ihave often used this instance to show that what the world calls modestyis a matter of time and place, and I now hold that too much modesty isout of time and place when a man who has had more than a fair share ofremarkable experiences undertakes a true relation of the extraordinaryadventures that have befallen him. So, if the narrative on which I amsetting out be marred by any affectation, it will not be the affectationof modesty.

  "When I was a boy in our valley behind the Blue Mountains ofPennsylvania, I used to read the 'True Travels, Adventures, andObservations of Captain John Smith, in Europe, Asia, Africa, andAmerica, from 1593 to 1629,' and wonder whether I should ever have anytravels or adventures of my own to make a book of. When, afterwards, Idid go a travelling, and adventures did come thick and fast upon me, Iwas too much engrossed in the travels and adventures themselves to givea thought as to what matter they might be for narration. Not till thisbreathing-place came in my life, did my boyhood dreams return to mymind, and did I realize that my part in battle and imprisonment, dangerand escape, love and intrigue, would make a book that might be worthfireside reading. That book I now begin, and shall probably finish it ifI be not interrupted by untimely death or by some new call to scenes ofenterprise and turmoil,--for it is no retired veteran, but a man earlyin his twenties, that here tries whether with pen and ink he can make asfair a show as he has already made with implements less peaceful."

  The foregoing lines constitute the first two paragraphs of a bookentitled "The Travels and Adventures of Richard Wetheral, in America,England, France, and Germany, in the years 1775, 1776, 1777, and 1778,"of which it happens, by strange circumstance, that I possess the onlycopy. The title-page shows that it was published by (or "printed for")J. Robson, Bookseller, in New Bond Street, London, in 1785. The threebrown 16mo volumes first caught my glance when they lay with a heap ofragged books on a board before a second-hand shop in Twenty-sixthStreet, there being attached to the board a weather-beaten square ofpasteboard, bearing the legend, "Your choice for ten cents." Not until Ihad paid the dealer thirty cents and separated the three volumes foreverfrom their musty companions, which were mostly of a theologicalcharacter, did I discover, by parting a blank leaf from the adjacentcover, to which it had long been sticking, that the book was a treasure,for which the dealer would have charged me as many dollars as I had paidcents, had he anticipated my discovery. The long-concealed page bore onits brown-spotted surface an inscription, in eighteenth centuryhandwriting, turned yellow by age, signed by the author of the book, andto the effect that he had caused his true narrative to be publishedwithout his wife's knowledge, thinking this book might afford her apleasant surprise, but that the surprise with which she first perused itwas so far from pleasant, she had forthwith, in the name of modesty,demanded its immediate suppression, which was at once accomplished byher indulgent husband, who had preserved only this one copy for thebenefit of posterity. When I asked the bookseller how he had come bythe copy, he told me, after an investigation, that he had bought it witha lot of religious books from the servant of a very old lady recentlydeceased. The dealer had thought, from the company in which it came,that the "travels and adventures" were those of some clergyman of ahundred years ago, and he had placed the three much dilapidated volumesamong the ten-cent rubbish accordingly.

  In giving this astonishing record of eighteenth century vicissitudes tothe world, I have two reasons for making myself the historian, and notpresenting the hero's book in his own correct and straightforwardEnglish. The first reason is, the public has been so satiated recentlywith novels told in the first person singular, that even a genuineautobiography must at this time be swallowed, if at all, with somenausea. The second reason is that the hero, writing only of his owndoings and his own witnessings and in his own day, necessarily omittedmany details, obtainable by me from other sources, and useful not onlyfor filling in the background of his narrative, but also that they throwlight on some points that were not quite clear to himself.

  THE ROAD TO PARIS.