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Preface to the First Edition published only a few days before the turn of the 19^th into the 20^th century.

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    Thirty-eight years ago, “an old man, broken by the storms of misfortune and wrong, came to me and with burning eyes and quavering voice begged that I would write down the things he would tell me.  He poured out in rude, impassioned speech, much of it with bated breath little above a whisper, a tale of lawlessness that ran through years and culminated in the murder of one of his own blood.  The people of whom he spoke and something of the history related by him were already known by me.  The notes then taken down from the lips of one who has long since paid the debt of nature were for a long time lost to sight and memory.  Lately, coming upon them by accident, and reading anew the simple, graphic words, appealing to me thus out of the silence and mists of almost forgotten years, the drama of which the old man’s story was a part comes back to me with the vividness of life, and I submit the story of it to the universal tribunal of publicity which can be trusted to award the justice denied elsewhere.  There are those yet living who will know much of this recital as real; and while rendering justice on the one hand, any unintentional injustice should be done on the other, let it be remembered that seldom, even in the republic of letters, are the scales of the blind goddess quite evenly balanced.

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     As the darkest clouds have a silver lining, so the tragedies of life are nearly always gilded with the diviner drama of Love; and, true to nature, this thread of gold will be found to run through the darker web woven in these pages.

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Granville Davisson Hall, December 15, 1899.