daughter to Herdegen Schopper.

In the course of a week I had not merely read the manuscript, but had
copied a great deal of what seemed to me best worth preservation,
including the verses. I subsequently had good reason to be glad that I
had taken so much pains, though travelling about at the time; for a cruel
disaster befel the trunk in which the manuscript was packed, with other
books and a few treasures, and which I had sent home by sea. The ship
conveying them was stranded at the mouth of the Elbe and my precious
manuscript perished miserably in the wreck.

The nine stitched sheets, of which the last was written by the hand of
Margery Schopper's younger brother, had found their way to Venice--as was
recorded on the last page--in the possession of Margery's great-grandson,
who represented the great mercantile house of Im Hoff on the Fondaco, and
who ultimately died in the City of St. Mark. When that famous firm was
broken up the papers were separated from their cover and had finally
fallen into the hands of the curiosity dealer of whom I bought them. And
after surviving travels on land, risk of fire, the ravages of worms and
the ruthlessness of man for four centuries, they finally fell a prey to
the destructive fury of the waves; but my memory served me well as to the
contents, and at my bidding was at once ready to aid me in restoring the
narrative I had read. The copied portions were a valuable aid, and
imagination was able to fill the gaps; and though it failed, no doubt, to
reproduce Margery Schopper's memoirs phrase for phrase and word for word,
I have on the whole succeeded in transcribing with considerable
exactitude all that she herself had thought worthy to be rescued from
oblivion. Moreover I have avoided the repetition of the mode of talk in
the fifteenth century, when German was barely commencing to be used as a
written language, since scholars, writers, and men of letters always
chose the Latin tongue for any great or elegant intellectual work. The
narrator's expressions would only be intelligible to a select few, and, I
should have done my Margery injustice, had I left the ideas and
descriptions, whose meaning I thoroughly understood, in the clumsy form
she had given them. The language of her day is a mirror whose uneven
surface might easily reflect the fairest picture in blurred or distorted
out lines to modern eyes. Much, indeed which most attracted me in her
descriptions will have lost its peculiar