[v]

CONTENTS

[vi]

[vii]

[vii]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[ix]

[ix]

PRELIMINARY

I have the honour humbly to inform my readers that, after prolonged consumption of midnight oil, I succeeded in completing this imposing society novel, which is now, by the indulgence of my friends and kind fathers, the honble publishers, laid at their feet.

My inducement to this enterprise was the spectacle of very inferior rubbish palmed off by so-called popular novelists such as Honbles Kipling, Joshua Barrie, Antony Weyman, Stanley Hope, and the collaborative but feminine authoresses of "The Red Thumb in the Pottage," all of whom profess (very, very incorrectly) to give accurate reliable descriptions of Indian, English or Scotch episodes.

The pity of it, that a magnificent and gullible British Public should be suckled like a babe on such spoonmeat and small beer![x]

[x]

Would no one arise, inflamed by the pure enthusiasm of his cacoethes scribendi, and write a romance which shall secure the plerophory of British, American, Anglo-Indian, Colonial, and Continental readers by dint of its imaginary power and slavish fidelity to Nature?

And since Echo answered that no one replied to this invitation, I (like a fool, as some will say) rushed in where angels were apprehensive of being too bulky to be borne.

Being naturally acquainted with gentlemen of my own nationality and education, and also, of course, knowing London and suburban society ab ovo usque ad mala (or, from the new-laid egg to the stage 

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