Note

Seven years ago we all went through the flames. And the happiness of
some of us since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured.
It is an added joy to Mina and to me that our boy's birthday is the
same day as that on which Quincey Morris died. His mother holds, I
know, the secret belief that some of our brave friend's spirit has
passed into him. His bundle of names links all our little band of men
together. But we call him Quincey.

In the summer of this year we made a journey to Transylvania, and went
over the old ground which was, and is, to us so full of vivid and
terrible memories. It was almost impossible to believe that the
things which we had seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears
were living truths. Every trace of all that had been was blotted
out. The castle stood as before, reared high above a waste of
desolation.

When we got home we were talking of the old time, which we could all
look back on without despair, for Godalming and Seward are both
happily married. I took the papers from the safe where they had been
ever since our return so long ago. We were struck with the fact, that
in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is
hardly one authentic document. Nothing but a mass of typewriting,
except the later notebooks of Mina and Seward and myself, and Van
Helsing's memorandum. We could hardly ask any one, even did we wish
to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story. Van Helsing summed
it all up as he said, with our boy on his knee.