At melius fuerat non scribere, namque tacere Tutum semper erit.

   NEW YORK

   ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY

   1921

   This edition is limited to nine hundred and twenty numbered copies, of which one hundred copies have been signed by the author.

   Copy Number __893__

   Copyright, 1921, by

    James Branch Cabell

   Revised and reprinted, by permission of the Editors, from

    The Literary Review

   Laudataque virtus crescit

   (

    Agent of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice

   )

   For no short while my indebtedness to you has been such as to require some sort of public acknowledgment, which may now, I think, be tendered most appropriately by inscribing upon the dedication page of this small volume the name to which you are daily adding in significance.

   It is a tribute, however trivial, which serves at least to express my appreciation of your zeal in re-establishing what seemed to the less optimistic a lost cause. I may to-day confess without much embarrassment that after fifteen years of foiled endeavors my (various) publishers and I had virtually decided that the printing of my books was not likely ever to come under the head of a business venture, but was more properly describable as a rather costly form of dissipation. People here and there would praise, but until you, unsolicited, had volunteered to make me known to the general public, nobody seemed appreciably moved to purchase.

   

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