tumbler pretty
spry, out of which you have been swallowing that eternal "drink o'
wotter," to which the human female of a certain social grade is so
odiously addicted. _Puff, puff, puff, puff!_ Too late, old gentleman
I unless you can do a mile in a good deal less than three minutes,
carrying weight, in the shape of a valise in one hand and a carpet-bag
in the other. That's the way with anything that's got any freight to
carry. It's slow when it sets out;--but steam is steam,--and what's bred
in the boiler will show in the driving-wheel, sooner or later.

If I had to _make up_ a story, now, it would be a very different matter.
I could never conceive how some of those romancers go to work, in cold
blood, to draw, out of what they call their imagination, a parcel of
impossible events and absurd characters. That is not my trouble; for I
have come into relation with a series of persons and events which will
save me the pains of drawing on my invention, in case I shall see fit to
follow the counsel of my too partial friends. I am only afraid I should
not disguise the circumstances enough, if I were to arrange these facts
in the narrative form. Some of them are of such a nature, that they
cannot be supposed to have happened more than once in the experience
of a generation; and I feel that the greatest caution and delicacy are
necessary in the manner of their presentation, not to offend the living
or wrong the memory of the dead.

It is very easy for you, the Reader, to sit down and run over the pages
of a monthly narrative as a boy "skips" a stone,--and the flatter and
thinner your capacity, the more skips, perhaps, you will make. But I
tell you, for a man who has live people to deal with, and hearts that
are beating even while he handles them,--a man who can go into families
and pull up by the roots all the mysteries of their dead generations and
their living sons' and daughters' secret history,--_responsible_ for
what he says, here and elsewhere,--open to a libel suit, if he isn't
pretty careful in his personalities, or to a visit from a brother or
other relative, wishing to know, Sir, and so forth,--or to a paragraph
in the leading journal of that whispering-gallery of a nation's gossip,
Little Millionville, to the effect that--We understand the personages
alluded to in the tale now publishing in the Oceanic Miscellany are
the Reverend Dr. S---h and his accomplished lady, the distinguished
financier, Mr. B---n,--and so t