who now-a-days blow you a thousand savages to paradise, and then sit down to lunch.

p. ix

Let there be no mistake; the writer and the reader are sworn foes. The writer labouring for bread, or hopes of fame, from idleness, from too much energy, or from that uncontrollable dance of St. Vitus in the muscles of the wrist which prompts so many men to write (the Lord knows why), works, blots, corrects, rewrites, revises, and improves; then publishes, and for the most part is incontinently damned. Then comes the reader cavalierly, as the train shunts at Didcot, or puffs and snorts into Carlisle, and gingerly examining the book says it is rubbish, and that he wonders how people who should have something else to do, find time to spend their lives in writing trash.

I take it that there is a modesty of mind as deep implanted in the soul of man as is the p. xsupergrafted post-Edenian modesty of the body; which latter, by the way, so soon is lost, restraints of custom or convention laid aside.

p. x

Who that would strip his clothes off, and walk down Piccadilly, even if the day were warm (the police all drunk or absent), without some hesitation, and an announcement of his purpose, say, in the columns of the Morning Post?

Therefore, why strip the soul stark naked to the public gaze without some hesitation and due interval, by means of which to make folk understand that which you write is what you think you feel; part of yourself, a part, moreover, which once given out can never be recalled?

So of the sketches in this book, most of them treat of scenes seen in that magic period, youth, when things impress themselves on the imagination more sharply than in after years; and the scenes too have vanished; that is, the countries where they passed have all been changed, and now-a-days are full of barbed-wire fences, advertisements, and desolation, the desolation born of imperfect progress. The people, too, I treat of, for the most part have disappeared; being born unfit for progress, it has passed over them, and their place is occupied by worthy men who cheat to p. xibetter purpose, and more scientifically. Therefore, I, writing as a man who has not only seen but lived with ghosts, may perhaps find pardon for this preface, for who would run in heavily and dance a hornpipe on the turf below which sleep the dead? And if I am not pardoned for my hesitation, dislike, or call it what you will, to give these little sketches to the world without 

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