[The following diary was originally written in lead pencil and in a bookthe leaves of which were too soft to take ink legibly. I have it directfrom the hands of its writer, a lady whom I have had the honor to know fornearly thirty years. For good reasons the author's name is omitted, andthe initials of people and the names of places are sometimes fictitiouslygiven. Many of the persons mentioned were my own acquaintances andfriends. When some twenty years afterwards she first resolved to publishit, she brought me a clear, complete copy in ink. It had cost muchtrouble, she said, for much of the pencil writing had been made under suchdisadvantages and was so faint that at times she could decipher it onlyunder direct sunlight. She had succeeded, however, in making a copy,_verbatim_ except for occasional improvement in the grammatical form of asentence, or now and then the omission, for brevity's sake, of somethingunessential. The narrative has since been severely abridged to bring itwithin the limits of this volume.
In reading this diary one is much charmed with its constant understatementof romantic and perilous incidents and conditions. But the originalpenciled pages show that, even in copying, the strong bent of the writerto be brief has often led to the exclusion of facts that enhance theinterest of exciting situations, and sometimes the omission robs her ownheroism of due emphasis. I have restored one example of this in the shortparagraph following her account of the night she spent fanning her sickhusband on their perilous voyage down the Mississippi.]