Book Description

Excerpt from Fifty Years of My Life For some years past my wife and children have been asking me to give some account of the race from which I spring, and of myself, its living representative. A compli ance with the first part of the request presented no great difficulty - the materials were at hand, and only wanted putting together.1 To do the rest of the bidding - to be come the hero of my own tale - has not proved so easy a matter; for although I have seen much of the world, literally and figuratively, it has not been my wont, as my family well know, to commit to writing my thoughts on things seen, heard, or done. On two occasions, it is true, I kept regular diaries, but these had reference to journeys which lay out of the ordinary track of travellers, and have already been laid before the public I was set, as it were, to furnish the tale of bricks without any allow ance of straw. Shrinking from the task, I used to put off my importuners with, Wait till I am seventy, and then - perhaps a phrase intending a postponement of the nu. 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.