Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, BY RALPH KEELER, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & CO., CAMBRIDGE.
This book is affectionately inscribed, with the wish, which is hardly a hope, that the public may take my Life half as easily and good-naturedly as he takes his own.
THE TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS OF THE “BOOKER TROUPE” 129
It is an odd sort of fortune to have lived an out-of-the-way or adventurous life. There is always a temptation to tell of it, and not always a reasonable surety that others share the interest in it of the _conteur_ himself. It would, indeed, be a nice problem in the descriptive geometry of narrative to determine the exact point where the lines of the two interests meet,--that of the narrator and that of the people who have to endure the narration. I cannot say that I ever hope to solve this problem; and in the present instance, especially, I would with due respect submit its solution to the acuter intellects of others.
This little book is intended to contain a plain sketch of my personal history up to the close of my twenty-second year. The autobiographical form is used, not because of any supposed interest of the public in the writer himself, but because there does not seem to be any other way in which a connected account of the adventures can well be given.
No one, I think, can be more sensible than I am that my story is nothing if not true. Hume has wisely said, “A man cannot speak long of himself without vanity.” I should like to be allowed to add that I have never known or conceived of a person--except probably the reader and writer of these pages--who could talk five minutes about himself without--lying. That is, to be sure, reducing the thing to mathematical exactness. An overestimating smile, or an underestimating shrug of the shoulders, or a tone of the voice even, will always--though sometimes inadvertently--
“leave it still unsaid in part, Or say it in too great excess.”
While this is not so applicable to written history, still in the face of hyperbolic and bathetic possibilities I owe it to myself to premise that I am going to be more than ordinarily truthful in this autobiography.