sauf les plus grandes, deviennent niaiseries tot ou tard.  Votre ignorance de ma langue m’epargne cette heure fatale.  Pour vous, mon livre sera toujours une belle et noble chose.  Il ne peut jamais devenir pour vous banal comme une epouse.  II sera pour vous une vierge, mieux qu’une vierge, il sera pour vous une demi-vierge.  Chaque fois que vous l’ouvrirez, vous penserez a des annees ecoulees, au jardin ou les rossignols chantent, a la foret ou rien ne se passe sauf la chute des feuilles, a nos promenades a Valvins pour voir le cher bonhomme; vous penserez a votre jeunesse et peut-etre un peu a la mienne.  Mais je veux que vous lisiez cette dedicace, et c’est pour cela que je l’ai ecrite en francais, dans un francais qui vous est tres familier, le mien.  Si je l’ecrivais en anglais et le faisais traduire dans le langage a la derniere mode de Paris, vous ne retrouveriez pas les accents barbares de votre vieil ami.  Ils sont barbares, je le concois, mais il y a des chiens qui sont laids et que l’on finit par aimer.

Une poignee de mains,

Georges Moore.

PREFACE

The concern of this preface is with the mistake that was made when ’The Lake’ was excluded from the volume entitled ‘The Untilled Field,’ reducing it to too slight dimensions, for bulk counts; and ‘The Lake,’ too, in being published in a separate volume lost a great deal in range and power, and criticism was baffled by the division of stories written at the same time and coming out of the same happy inspiration, one that could hardly fail to beget stories in the mind of anybody prone to narrative—­the return of a man to his native land, to its people, to memories hidden for years, forgotten, but which rose suddenly out of the darkness, like water out of the earth when a spring is tapped.

Some chance words passing between John Eglinton and me as we returned home one evening from Professor Dowden’s were enough.  He spoke, or I spoke, of a volume of Irish stories; Tourgueniev’s name was mentioned, and next morning—­if not the next morning, certainly not later than a few mornings after—­I was writing ‘Homesickness,’ while the story of ‘The Exile’ was taking shape in my mind.  ‘The Exile’ was followed by a series of four stories, a sort of village odyssey.  ‘A Letter to Rome’ is as good as these and as typical of my country.  ‘So on He Fares’ is the one that, perhaps, out of the whole volume I like the best, always excepting ‘The Lake,’ which, alas, was not included, but which belongs so strictly to the aforesaid stories that my memory includes it in the volume.