scribed, inadequately of course, but with reasonable faithfulness. Necessity has forced too much dealing with material things. Art, music, literature, are still in their infancy. It is only recently and partially that Texas has emerged from the pioneer stage. Even industrial Texas is as yet but a young Hercules. There are, however, the healthy beginnings of an intellectual and artistic life, all of the flowers of civilization are preparing to burst into bloom. The shadows of great events are being cast in advance; to-day promises a still more glorious to-morrow. A book of this character can claim but little originality. All of its facts, many of its opinions, most of its jokes and anecdotes, have been gathered from sources too varied to be more than partly acknowledged in a list of names to be found in the Appendix. Much information has been obtained in letters from persons intimately acquainted with certain details. "They knew 'e stole, 'e knew they knowed." The only merits that this book may possibly possess must depend upon the selection and arrangement of the material, upon the presentation of big and little facts in proper proportion, upon a truthfulness that makes no effort to hide faults or to display virtues. "Prefaces ever were and still are of two sorts: . . . still the author keeps to his old and wonted method of prefacing, when at the beginning of his book, he enters, either with a halter about his neck, submitting himself to his reader's mercy whether he shall be hanged or no; or else in a huffing manner he appears, with a halter in his hand, and threatens to hang his reader if he gives him not his good word." As dear Elliott Coues once wrote, the authors desire neither to hang nor to be hanged; they wish they were better than they are for their own sake; they wish their book were better than it is for their reader's sake. |