THE ROAD TO PARIS

INTRODUCTION.


"With our company of riflemen that marched in Arnold's army through the
Maine wilderness to attack Quebec, there was a sergeant's wife, a large
and sturdy woman, no common camp-follower, but decent and respected, who
one day, when the troops started to wade through a freezing pond, of
which they broke the thin ice coating with the butts of their guns,
calmly lifted her skirts above her waist and strode in, and so kept the
greater part of her clothes dry in crossing. Not a man of us made a
jest, or even grinned, so natural was her action in the circumstances. I
have often used this instance to show that what the world calls modesty
is a matter of time and place, and I now hold that too much modesty is
out of time and place when a man who has had more than a fair share of
remarkable experiences undertakes a true relation of the extraordinary
adventures that have befallen him. So, if the narrative on which I am
setting out be marred by any affectation, it will not be the affectation
of modesty.

"When I was a boy in our valley behind the Blue Mountains of
Pennsylvania, I used to read the 'True Travels, Adventures, and
Observations of Captain John Smith, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and
America, from 1593 to 1629,' and wonder whether I should ever have any
travels or adventures of my own to make a book of. When, afterwards, I
did go a travelling, and adventures did come thick and fast upon me, I
was too much engrossed in the travels and adventures themselves to give
a thought as to what matter they might be for narration. Not till this
breathing-place came in my life, did my boyhood dreams return to my
mind, and did I realize that my part in battle and imprisonment, danger
and escape, love and intrigue, would make a book that might be worth
fireside reading. That book I now begin, and shall probably finish it if
I be not interrupted by untimely death or by some new call to scenes of
enterprise and turmoil,--for it is no retired veteran, but a man early
in his twenties, that here tries whether with pen and ink he can make as
fair a show as he has already made with implements less peaceful."

The foregoing lines constitute the first two paragraphs of a book
entitled "The Travels and Adventures of Richard Wetheral, in America,
England, France, and Germany, in the years 1775, 1776, 1777, and 1778,"
of which it happens, by strange circumstance, that I possess the only
copy. The title-page shows that it was published by (or "printed for")
J. Robson, Bookseller, in New Bond Street, London, in 1785. The three
brown 16mo volumes first caught my glance when they lay with a heap of
ragged books on a board before a second-hand shop in Twenty-sixth
Street, there being attached to the board a weather-beaten square of
pasteboard, bearing the legend, "Your choice for ten cents." Not until I
had paid the dealer thirty cents and separated the three volumes forever
from their musty companions, which were mostly of a theological
character, did I discover, by parting a blank leaf from the adjacent
cover, to which it had long been sticking, that the book was a treasure,
for which the dealer would have charged me as many dollars as I had paid
cents, had he anticipated my discovery. The long-concealed page bore on
its brown-spotted surface an inscription, in eighteenth century
handwriting, turned yellow by age, signed by the author of the book, and
to the effect that he had caused his true narrative to be published
without his wife's knowledge, thinking this book might afford her a
pleasant surprise, but that the surprise with which she first perused it
was so far from pleasant, she had forthwith, in the name of modesty,
demanded its immediate suppression, which was at once accomplished by
her indulgent husband, who had preserved only this one copy for the
benefit of posterity. When I asked the bookseller how he had come by
the copy, he told me, after an investigation, that he had bought it with
a lot of religious books from the servant of a very old lady recently
deceased. The dealer had thought, from the company in which it came,
that the "travels and adventures" were those of some clergyman of a
hundred years ago, and he had placed the three much dilapidated volumes
among the ten-cent rubbish accordingly.

In giving this astonishing record of eighteenth century vicissitudes to
the world, I have two reasons for making myself the historian, and not
presenting the hero's book in his own correct and straightforward
English. The first reason is, the public has been so satiated recently
with novels told in the first person singular, that even a genuine
autobiography must at this time be swallowed, if at all, with some
nausea.