Individual Entry Archive: Consider This

Keep Close at My Heels

CHAPTER II

Having thus briefly introduced my reader to the world, and given him some idea of its form and situation, he will naturally be curious to know from whence it came, and how it was created. And, indeed, the clearing up of these points is absolutely essential to my history, inasmuch as if this world had not been formed, it is more than probable that this renowned island, on which is situated the city of New York, would never have had an existence. The regular course of my history, therefore, requires that I should proceed to notice the cosmogony or formation of this our globe.

And now I give my readers fair warning that I am about to plunge, for a chapter or two, into as complete a labyrinth as ever historian was perplexed withal; therefore, I advise them to take fast hold of my skirts, and keep close at my heels, venturing neither to the right hand nor to the left, lest they get bemired in a slough of unintelligible learning, or have their brains knocked out by some of those hard Greek names which will be flying about in all directions. But should any of them be too indolent or chicken-hearted to accompany me in this perilous undertaking, they had better take a short cut round, and wait for me at the beginning of some smoother chapter.
—Washington Irving from his Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete

Project Gutenberg's Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete by Washington Irving, originally published by W.B. Conkey Company in December, 1809.
⇒ Today, April 3^rd, Washington Irving was born in New York City in 1783. He died November 28, 1859 in Tarrytown, New York.
See also:
⇒ WikiPedia's Washington Irving
⇒ Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac for Tuesday, April 3, 2007

WashingtonPost.com's Faces of the Fallen: Navy
U.S. Service members who died in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom