Mildreds Wedding PDF Download

Excerpt from Mildred's Wedding: A Family History I am asked by my daughter to write out the eventful history of my youth for the perusal of my grandchildren. I consent on two conditions. Firstly, I must not be found fault with if, in relating past events, I refer to them with the foolings of the present time. No young voice most cry out in criticism, Oh, you were only ten, twelve, fourteen, or whatever age it might be, when this happened; you could not have thought in such or such a way. To all those objections beforehand, I answer, Well, I am sixty-four now I am telling the story, and if in my narration of the incidents of my youth and childhood there creep in, on hobbling gait, the wise, saws and sad thoughts of age, I cannot help it. It is the fault of my years, not of my pen. I will promise you that I will often search back into my spirit, and gather op, if I can, those light clouds of fancy that children coll thought. But I am old now, and I am not sure that I shall always succeed. The withered leaf at best is but a sad, mocking image of the same leaf in its fresh green spring. Perhaps I shall often give you such an image, and beguile myself with the fancy that it is a garland from the rosy May of my youth. Forgive me: I glance at ray face in this glass standing on my table, and I see I am myself a withered leaf. I can show you, then, only the form of my life, not its freshness Moreover, the silken webs of thought are so fragile, and we grow so gradually from youth to age, that we know not when tho change began which transformed these gossamer threads of young fancy into strong cables of reason, or iron fetters of care. Then smile if you will if I sometimes present yon with mature reflection, as the thought of a child, or if with unwitting hand I paint my portrait of a young girl with the wrinkles of an old woman. Thus premising of my first condition, I open my second. It is, that I must be allowed to tell my story my own way, and as it came to me piece by piece, year by year, until it grew into a whole. If then, it appears to you in the same broken shape - here a picture, and there an imperfect utterance, a servant's tale, a child's dream, a night vision, coming and going like the shifting spectra of a kaleidoscope - you must pardon me; it was thus I gathered it up, and I can only relate it as it was painted upon my own mind In a series of strange pictures, one often repeating the other, though draw by another hand. There is yet a reason why yon must pardon me if the picture I am now about to paint - into which I work, as it were, all the broken, shifting scenes of which I speak - should not be as perfect as my imagination would fain make it. The reason I will not speak of here. It will come into my tale at its right place. It will come like a blank, and then you will find that such a blank sadly mars the web of a life, and is a chasm which the after-time can only rudely bridge over. Thus bargaining for your kindness, I dip my pen in tho ink, I turn back wistfully to the past, and beckon to the phantoms of the dead whose living forms then shone around me. 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.