lay in running the illicit goods and distributing them, in the case of guinea-smuggling its arduousness was further increased by the danger of collecting the gold inland and clearing from home harbours.

Very little, as I said, has ever been heard of this singular trade, and for obvious reasons. In the first place it obtained only for a comparatively small number of years, the latter part of the Great War: the last of it belonging to the period of the Hundred Days. And in the second it was, at all times, of necessity confined to a very small number of free-trading skippers. Of adventurous men, in stirring days, there were of course a multitude. But few, naturally, were the men to whose honour the custody of so much ready wealth could safely be intrusted. "That is where," as Captain Jack says sometimes in this book, "the 'likes of me' come in."

The exchange was enormously profitable. As much as thirty-two shillings in silver value could, at one time, be obtained on the other side of the water for an English guinea. But the shipper and broker, in an illegal venture where contract could not be enforced, had to be a man whose simple word was warranty—and indeed, in the case of large [Pg xvi] consignments, this blind trust had to be extended to almost every man of his crew. What a romance could be written upon this theme alone!

[Pg xvi]

In the story of Adrian Landale, however, it plays but a subsidiary part. Brave, joyous-hearted Captain Jack and his bold venture for a fortune appear only in the drama to turn its previous course to unforeseen channels; just as in most of our lives, the sudden intrusion of a new strong personality—transient though it may be, a tempest or a meteor—changes their seemingly inevitable trend to altogether new issues.

It was urged by my English publishers that, in "The Light of Scarthey," I relate two distinct love-stories and two distinct phases of one man's life; and that it were wiser (by which word I presume was meant more profitable) to distribute the tale between two books, one to be a sequel to the other. Happily I would not be persuaded to cut a fully composed canvas in two for the sake of the frames. "It is the fate of sequels," as Stevenson said in his dedication of Catriona, "to disappoint those who have waited for them." Besides, life is essentially continuous.—It may not be inept to state a truism of this kind in a world of novels where the climax of life, if not indeed its very conclusion, is held to be reached on the day of marriage! There is often, of course, more than one 

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