Book Description

Excerpt from The Surgeon's Log: Being Impressions of the Far East IT is almost eighteen months since the impressions here recorded first were offered to the public; and re-reading them now, after the interval, I am conscious that for me the first glad joy of it is over, I can never again recapture the shimmering golden glamour of it all. Indeed, looking back through the grey mist of England, I find myself tempted, with the wisdom or folly of later remembrance, to revise, rewrite, tone down some of the pictures that now seem too polychromatic in the retrospect. But I have refrained, feeling that thereby any value they may possess as truth would be mirror dimmed by the breathings of the later mood - their individuality would thus be lost. Nevertheless, I have yielded to temptation to this extent: so' many have written asking What became of them afterwards? That I have added a postscript to the original narrative telling what they thought of it all, and how they liked being put into a book. Nothing had pleased me more than the numerous letters I have received from doctors - young men writing eagerly to know if I could find them such a ship in which they might have such experiences, older men enquiring furtively, apologetically, if their grey hairs could possibly be overlooked so that they too might find themselves amid similar surroundings. Apparently romance dies hard, and so to all I have replied that, given the proper subjective attitude of mind, their pleasure under similar circumstances would be as great - for it is in ourselves, not in the events that occur to us that happiness is to be found. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.