cleanliness and freshness of mind and body make old age lovely and desirable.” The writer has nowhere interfered with these memories, neither in interview nor in transcription; and at the risk of seeming unkind to lonely and impoverished old men and women, whom a slight kindness by way of gift might have enlivened, has refrained from any such act, lest it might be said, to the detriment of this history, that the writer, too, had set forth an invention, instead of the truth.
But it is a task which I have imposed upon myself to take the wheat of memory and leave the chaff. I have refused ignoble deductions volunteered as information. I have refrained from handling the relics of rural jealousy strong enough to endure for eighty years, babbling what it merely conjectured almost a century ago concerning a nature it could not then and cannot now comprehend.
I ask the reader to refuse to accept as biography such gossip which the ephemeral press has detailed. For truth's sake, divest your mind of all speculation and conjecture by which the true story of this life has been so ruthlessly caricatured; divest it at least for the time, and approach without prejudice for an acquaintance with this truly great and singular character. We as human beings owe something to the consciousness of the age, the great highway of souls to come after us. We should make the path straight by rejecting wilful scandal, however amusing and diverting, and by choosing to know the simple gospel truth.
