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Such unparalleled freeness on your part would have been to open all the recesses of my past life to your inspection. Very likely you were
right; but, I don’t know how it is, I never was a man that could make a clean breast of it, and tell everything, even to the dearest
friend that ever lived. There are certain matters I somehow can’t bring my mind to lay bare to anybody; not, perhaps, because they are more shameful or more selfish than such matters commonly are, but they are mine—mine only—if you have any little private concerns of your own, I hope, in your own mind, you will give me credit for a share of suchlike reticence. However, not to disappoint you entirely, I intend, before we separate, to trouble you with one or two family matters; and if anything I can tell you about my own concerns can afford you entertainment or instruction, you are welcome to the narrative of which the leading features shall be given as shortly as possible,
with all the original reflections and observations thereon that I can muster.

I must go back to a very early period of my life, to begin properly; for it was not till after many significant incidents had occurred, that the idea of making any record of them entered my head; and you shall chew the cud of those very unsophisticated, unadulterated
facts, without any high-seasoning of wit or humour to make them palatable. I never could excite in myself an interest in tales of
studied adventures, and fabricated horrors. The simple narrative and ordinary feelings of an obscure individual seem to me more
attractive than the most thrilling romance or the most wonderful plutonist; I may, or may not, proceed afterwards to give an account of the
more remarkable events of my life that followed.

So begins our journey through my life’s tale, friends of old and scenes long vanished.