. B. Brady

Mrs. Lincoln in 1861

Henry Watterson--Fifty Years Ago

Henry Woodfire Grady--One of Mr. Watterson's "Boys"

Mr. Watterson's Library at "Mansfield"

A Corner of "Mansfield"--Home of Mr. Watterson

Henry Watterson (Photograph Taken in Florida)

Henry Watterson. From a painting by Louis Mark in the Manhattan Club,
New York

"MARSE HENRY"

Chapter the First

I Am Born and Begin to Take Notice--John Quincy Adams and Andrew
Jackson--James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce--Jack Dade and "Beau
Hickman"--Old Times in Washington

I

I am asked to jot down a few autobiographic odds and ends from such data
of record and memory as I may retain. I have been something of a student
of life; an observer of men and women and affairs; an appraiser of their
character, their conduct, and, on occasion, of their motives. Thus, a
kind of instinct, which bred a tendency and grew to a habit, has led me
into many and diverse companies, the lowest not always the meanest.

Circumstance has rather favored than hindered this bent. I was born in a
party camp and grew to manhood on a political battlefield. I have lived
through stirring times and in the thick of events. In a vein colloquial
and reminiscential, not ambitious, let me recall some impressions which
these have left upon the mind of one who long ago reached and turned the
corner of the Scriptural limitation; who, approaching fourscore, does
not yet feel painfully the frost of age beneath the ravage of time's
defacing waves. Assuredly they have not obliterated his sense either of
vision or vista. Mindful of the adjuration of Burns,

Keep something to yourself,
Ye scarcely tell to ony,

I shall yet hold little in reserve, having no state secrets or mysteries
of the soul to reveal.

It is not my purpose to be or to seem oracular. I shall not write after
the manner of Rousseau, whose Confessions had been better honored in the
breach than the observance, and in any event whose sincerity will bear
question; nor have I tales to tell after the manner of Paul Barras,
whose Memoirs have earned him an immortality of infamy. Neither shall
I emulate the grandiose volubility and self-complacent posing of
Metternich and Talleyrand, whose pretentious volumes rest for the most
part unopened upon dusty shelves. I aspire to none of the honors of the
historian. It shall be my aim as far as may be to avoid the garrulity of
the raconteur and to restra