Preface

The writer of these apologues hopes that the Rev. Mr. Gowles will not be regarded as his idea of a typical missionary. The countrymen of Codrington and Callaway, of Patteson and Livingstone, know better what missionaries may be, and often are. But the wrong sort as well as the right sort exists everywhere, and Mr. Gowles is not a very gross caricature of the ignorant teacher of heathendom. I am convinced that he would have seen nothing but a set of darkened savages in the ancient Greeks. The religious eccentricities of the Hellenes are not exaggerated in "The End of Phaeacia;" nay, Mr. Gowles might have seen odder things in Attica than he discovered, or chose to record, in Boothland.

To avoid the charge of plagiarism, perhaps it should be mentioned that "The Romance of the First Radical" was written long before I read Tanner's "Narrative of a Captivity among the Indians." Tanner, like Why--Why, had trouble with the chief medicine-man of his community.

If my dear kinsman and companion of old days, J. J. A., reads "My Friend the Beach-comber," he will recognize many of his own yarns, but the portrait of the narrator is wholly fanciful.

"In Castle Perilous" and "A Cheap Nigger" are reprinted from the Cornhill Magazine; "My Friend the Beach-comber," from Longman's; "The Great Gladstone Myth," from Macmillan's; "In the Wrong Paradise," from the Fortnightly Review; "A Duchess's Secret," from the Overland Mail; "The Romance of the First Radical," from Fraser's Magazine; and "The End of Phaeacia," from Time, by the courteous permission of the editors and proprietors of those periodicals.