ecorded, he will describe them in his own
person. When his experience fails, he will retire from the position of
narrator; and his task will be continued, from the point at which he
has left it off, by other persons who can speak to the circumstances
under notice from their own knowledge, just as clearly and positively
as he has spoken before them.

Thus, the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as
the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than
one witness--with the same object, in both cases, to present the truth
always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect; and to trace
the course of one complete series of events, by making the persons who
have been most closely connected with them, at each successive stage,
relate their own experience, word for word.

Let Walter Hartright, teacher of drawing, aged twenty-eight years, be
heard first.

II

It was the last day of July. The long hot summer was drawing to a
close; and we, the weary pilgrims of the London pavement, were
beginning to think of the cloud-shadows on the corn-fields, and the
autumn breezes on the sea-shore.

For my own poor part, the fading summer left me out of health, out of
spirits, and, if the truth must be told, out of money as well. During
the past year I had not managed my professional resources as carefully
as usual; and my extravagance now limited me to the prospect of
spending the autumn economically between my mother's cottage at
Hampstead and my own chambers in town.

The evening, I remember, was still and cloudy; the London air was at
its heaviest; the distant hum of the street-traffic was at its
faintest; the small pulse of the life within me, and the great heart of
the city around me, seemed to be sinking in unison, languidly and more
languidly, with the sinking sun. I roused myself from the book which I
was dreaming over rather than reading, and left my chambers to meet the
cool night air in the suburbs. It was one of the two evenings in every
week which I was accustomed to spend with my mother and my sister. So
I turned my steps northward in the direction of Hampstead.

Events which I have yet to relate make it necessary to mention in this
place that my father had been dead some years at the period of which I
am now writing; and that my sister Sarah and I were the sole survivors
of a family of five children. My father was a drawing-master before
me. His exertions had made