ought best, they may all be
collected, arranged, and placed beyond wear, tear, and loss, in the
perpetual custody of type.

The papers remaining in the office of the clerk of this county were
transcribed into a volume a few years since; the copyist supplying,
conjecturally, headings to the several documents. Although he executed
his work in an elegant manner, and succeeded in giving correctly many
documents hard to be deciphered, such errors, owing to the condition
of the papers, occurred in arranging them, transcribing their
contents, and framing their headings, that I have had to resort to the
originals throughout.

As the object of this work is to give to the reader of the present day
an intelligible view of a transaction of the past, and not to
illustrate any thing else than the said transaction, no attempt has
been made to preserve the orthography of that period. Most of the
original papers were written without any expectation that they would
ever be submitted to inspection in print; many of them by plain
country people, without skill in the structure of sentences, or regard
to spelling; which, in truth, was then quite unsettled. It is no
uncommon thing to find the same word spelled differently in the same
document. It is very questionable whether it is expedient or just to
perpetuate blemishes, often the result of haste or carelessness,
arising from mere inadvertence. In some instances, where the interest
of the passage seemed to require it, the antique style is preserved.
In no case is a word changed or the structure altered; but the now
received spelling is generally adopted, and the punctuation made to
express the original sense.

It is indeed necessary, in what claims to be an exact reprint of an
old work, to imitate its orthography precisely, even at the expense of
difficulty in apprehending at once the meaning, and of perpetuating
errors of carelessness and ignorance. Such modern reproductions are
valuable, and have an interest of their own. They deserve the favor of
all who desire to examine critically, and in the most authentic form,
publications of which the original copies are rare, and the earliest
editions exhausted. The enlightened and enterprising publishers who
are thus providing facsimiles of old books and important documents of
past ages ought to be encouraged and rewarded by a generous public.
But the present work does not belong to that class, or make any
pretensions of that kind.

My than