A Night on the Borders of the Black Forest

NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 1890 My story (if story it can be called, being an episode in my own early life) carries me back to a time when the world and I were better friends than we are likely, perhaps, ever to be again. I was young then. I had good health, good spirits, and tolerably good looks. I had lately come into a snug little patrimony, which I have long since dissipated; and I was in love, or fancied myself in love, with a charming coquette, who afterwards threw me over for a West-country baronet with seven thousand a year. So much for myself. The subject is not one that I particularly care to dwell upon; but as I happen to be the hero of my own narrative, some sort of self-introduction is, I suppose, necessary. To begin then—Time: seventeen years ago. Hour:—three o'clock p.m., on a broiling, cloudless September afternoon