Transcribed from the 1886 Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry In the Wrong Paradise and Other Stories by Andrew Lang Contents: The End of Phæacia In the Wrong Paradise A Cheap Nigger The Romance of the First Radical A Duchess’s Secret The House of Strange Stories In Castle Perilous The Great Gladstone Myth My Friend the Beach-Comber DEDICATION. DEAR RIDER HAGGARD, I have asked you to let me put your name here, that I might have the opportunity of saying how much pleasure I owe to your romances. They make one a boy again while one is reading them; and the student of “The Witch’s Head” and of “King Solomon’s Mines” is as young, in heart, as when he hunted long ago with Chingachgook and Uncas. You, who know the noble barbarian in his African retreats, appear to retain more than most men of his fresh natural imagination. We are all savages under our white skins; but you alone recall to us the delights and terrors of the world’s nonage. We are hunters again, trappers, adventurers bold, while we study you, and the blithe barbarian wakens even in the weary person of letters. He forgets proof-sheets and papers, and the “young lion” seeks his food from God, in the fearless ancient way, with bow or rifle. Of all modern heroes of romance, the dearest to me is your faithful Zulu, and I own I cried when he bade farewell to his English master, in “The Witch’s Head.” In the following tales the natural man takes a hand, but he is seen through civilized spectacles, not, as in your delightful books, with the eyes of the sympathetic sportsman. If Why-Why and Mr. Gowles amuse you a little, let this be my Diomedean exchange of bronze for gold—of the new Phæacia for Kukuana land, or for that haunted city of Kôr, in which your fair Ayesha dwells undying, as yet unknown to the future lovers of She. Very sincerely yours, A. LANG. CROMER, August 29, 1886. PREFACE. The writer of these apologues hopes that the Rev. Mr. Gowles will not be regarded as his idea of a typical missionary. The countrymen of Codrington and Callaway, of Patteson and Livingstone, know better what missionaries may be, and often are. But the wrong sort as well as the right sort exists everywhere, and Mr. Gowles is not a
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