Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/29

 certain of my attempts in fiction, though I have always hoped that the fiction was the essential reality of life, and have tried to make it so.

I am certain, however, that the incident as related is entirely authentic, for I have recently made inquiries and established it beyond a reasonable doubt, as the lawyers say, in all its details as here given. I say in all its details, save possibly as to that of my own corporeal presence on the scene, at the actual moment of the occurrence. Only the other day I asked a favorite aunt of mine, and she remembered the incident perfectly, and many another similar to it. "It was just like him," she added, with a dubious, though tolerant fondness. But when, like the insistent, questioning child in one of Riley's Hoosier poems, I asked her if I had been there, she said she could not remember.

But whether I was there in the flesh or not, or whether the whole reality of that scene, so poignant, and insistent, and indelible, with its denial of the grounds of authority, its challenge to the bases of society, its shock to the orthodox mind (like that of John Brand of Kentucky, a strict constructionist, who believed in the old Constitution, and even then, in slavery), remains in my memory as the result of one of those tricks of a mind that has always dramatized scenes for its own amusement, I was there in spirit, and, indeed, at many another scene in the life of Joseph Carter Brand, whose name my mother gave me as a good heritage. Whatever the bald and banal physical fact may have been, I was either present at the actual or in imagination at the