In all my journeys through the dark into other lives that have been mine I have never been able to guide any journey to a particular destination.

Thus many new experiences of old lives were mine before ever I chanced to return to the boy Jesse at Nephi.

Possibly, all told, I have lived over Jesse's experiences a score of times, sometimes taking up his career when he was quite small in the Arkansas settlements, and at least a dozen times carrying on past the point where I left him at Nephi.

It were a waste of time to detail the whole of it; and so, without prejudice to the verity of my account, I shall skip much that is vague and tortuous and repetitional, and give the facts as I have assembled them out of the various times, in whole and part, as I relived them..