The Warlord [antikvár]

PART ONEWherein 1 describe how it came about that I am telling this tale, which no other has toldIt is an uncertain thing when an old man sits down to write a tale of his youth, in the long ago; for even if he remembers well, his memory will be cold with time; and no matter how well he remembers, he is making a drama in which the players are dead and the scenes have been shifted I remember not so long ago that we were in New York and saw a production of King Lear, where Hammond Drice played the old man so well that I was moved to return the next day to tell him how much I understood, and how much I was touched by him. I would perhaps have gone backstage that same evening, but I was awed at the thought of the grand and glamorous personality of the actor since we have no theater in York in Pennsylvania, where I still live and I put it off until the next day. But the next day, my wife urged me to it and I went; for even if I was not at ease with large city things, I was twice representative in the State House, and never playing a stick of politics to get there, and once in Congress too, and the law I practiced was law in which I tried to find justice at least as much as I tried to find a living. But you see that already I am off and drifting, the way an old man drifts when he sets out to put down a simple sequence of events, and I mention this simply because the show had finished the next day. The flats