Author's Preface

One little picture in this book, the Magic Locket, at p. 77, was drawn
by 'Miss Alice Havers.' I did not state this on the title-page, since
it seemed only due, to the artist of all these (to my mind) wonderful
pictures, that his name should stand there alone.

The descriptions, at pp. 386, 387, of Sunday as spent by children of
the last generation, are quoted verbatim from a speech made to me by a
child-friend and a letter written to me by a lady-friend.

The Chapters, headed 'Fairy Sylvie' and 'Bruno's Revenge,' are a reprint,
with a few alterations, of a little fairy-tale which I wrote
in the year 1867, at the request of the late Mrs. Gatty,
for 'Aunt Judy's Magazine,' which she was then editing.

It was in 1874, I believe, that the idea first occurred to me of making
it the nucleus of a longer story. As the years went on, I jotted down,
at odd moments, all sorts of odd ideas, and fragments of dialogue,
that occurred to me--who knows how?--with a transitory suddenness that
left me no choice but either to record them then and there, or to abandon
them to oblivion. Sometimes one could trace to their source these
random flashes of thought--as being suggested by the book one was reading,
or struck out from the 'flint' of one's own mind by the 'steel' of a
friend's chance remark but they had also a way of their own, of occurring,
a propos of nothing--specimens of that hopelessly illogical phenomenon,
'an effect without a cause.' Such, for example, was the last line of
'The Hunting of the Snark,' which came into my head (as I have already
related in 'The Theatre' for April, 1887) quite suddenly, during a solitary
walk: and such, again, have been passages which occurred in dreams,
and which I cannot trace to any antecedent cause whatever.
There are at least two instances of such dream-suggestions in this book--
one, my Lady's remark, 'it often runs in families, just as a love for
pastry does', at p. 88; the other, Eric Lindon's badinage about having
been in domestic service, at p. 332.

And thus it came to pass that I found myself at last in possession of a
huge unwieldy mass of litterature--if the reader will kindly excuse the
spelling--which only needed stringing together, upon the thread of a
consecutive story, to constitute the book I hoped to write.
Only! The task, at first, seemed absolutely hopeless, and gave me a far
clearer idea, than I ever had before, of the meaning of the word 'chaos':
and I think it must have been ten years, or more, before I had succeeded
in classifying these odds-and-ends sufficiently to see what sort of a
story they indicated: for the story had to grow out of the incidents,
not the incidents out of the story I am telling all this, in no spirit
of egoism, but because