Friend Clara:

An incident in my boyish life tonight passes before me in all the tinting of a panoramic view; and as my thoughts run back over the checkered pathway of forty years, which has sprinkled my hair with gray, filled my life with thorns and orange blossoms, to a month that has left its imprint on my whole life, I wish that I possessed the power to reproduce the picture in all its colors and do justice to the work which, at your request, I undertake to-night. I regret that the favor you ask is one which compels me to write of myself. To a modest man, lacking that phrenological enlargement that as a rule in men and women predominates to such a lamentable degree, the position is embarrassing; and in the perusal of this I trust your eye will rest on this unpleasant character as little as possible.

I was born neath a warm sun and southern skies, where the air was freighted with blended odor of the magnolia and jasmine that heightened the senses; where everything had its bud and blossom almost at its birth; where the dreamy languor of the voluptuary seemed inherent in all, where even in those which here in the North would be termed children, the sexual spark only waited for contact to flame up in its power; where girls where mothers at thirteen and grandmas at thirty; but up to my eleventh year I had known only books and sketching; a sweet-tempered, linen-dressed boy, who lived out of the sunshine and ignored the innocent deviltries of youth; who looked upon girls as horrid; whose life was rounded by a pony, books, pictures, and the flowers in the conservatory. But changes for good or evil take place in every life. It came to mine; and on that sweet-sighing summer day in my twelfth year, when Cupid threw apart the silken curtains, revealing beauties of which I had not even dreamed, my hand lost its cunning; to books I said farewell and ambition was dead.