paper, and I met Miss Ashford some weeks ago in London and I have had all the proof one needs that this is the authentic product of a nine-year-old mind."

To which I said:

"No doubt some people will be saying the same thing over here and they'll be wrong just as these English skeptics are and if they'll only stop to think for a moment they'll know why they're wrong. No grown person, not even the creator of a Wendy and a Peter Pan,[ix] could have done this thing. It exhales the perfume of an authoritative genuineness in every line of it. It had to be a child who wrote it—a child with a child's imagination and a child's viewpoint and a child's ignorance of the things she wrote about. In a way of speaking it is like those unintentionally humorous obituary poems which appear in the papers. No professional humorist can hope to equal them because when he writes one he does it with deliberate intent to be funny and invariably he betrays his hand. It is when some poor mourning amateur dips a 'prentice pen in the very blood of his or her heart and writes such a poem that it becomes so pathetically and so tragically side-splitting."

[ix]

This was what I said. Not in these words exactly, but to this effect.

Mind you, I am not proclaiming that I am the only person who has said this. Between chuckles thousands and thousands of others since that day have thought and have said it. What I am proud of is that I was the first person in America to say it, and so to this extent I count myself a discoverer and I feel a sort of proprietary sense in being permitted here to introduce "Daisy Ashford: Her Book." I[x] am mindful of the distinction because of the reason I have just stated and because also in a way of speaking it qualifies me for some sort of literary kinship with Sir James M. Barrie.

[x]

Even so I do not aspire to the presumptuous hope that any one may say "Well, I see this man Cobb is doing for Miss Ashford's second book what Barrie did for her first one." I have no such ambition. A minnow always errs when he undertakes to swim in the company of a whale. If he tries to swim alongside he is unnoticed; if he swims in the wake he is swamped. He makes other minnows jealous or contemptuous as the case may be, and he is properly ignored by the whale.

Miss Ashford's own preface, accompanying this volume, gives the chronological sequences of its contents. The first story of all, "A Short Story of Love and Marriage," she wrote when she 

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