"A truthful narrative, not a tale of fiction, is presented in the following chapters to our readers. All that the imagination has contributed to it has been the names of the actors, -true names having been withheld, lest, perhaps, friends might be grieved, -the filling up of the dialogues, in which, while thoughts and sentiments have been remembered, the verbiage that clothed them has been forgotten, and, in a few instances, the grouping together of incidents that actually occurred at wider intervals than here represented, for the sake of the unity of the story. "