“Two Men” I began as I did the others, with a single motive; the shadow of a man passed before me, and I built a visionary fabric round him.  I have never tried to girdle the earth; my limits are narrow; the modern novel, as Andrew Lang lately calls it,—­with its love-making, disquisition, description, history, theology, ethics,—­I have no sprinkling of.  My last novel, “Temple House,” was personally conducted, so far that I went to Plymouth to find a suitable abode for my hero, Angus Gates, and to measure with my eye the distance between the bar in the bay and the shore, the scene of a famous wreck before the Revolution.  As my stories and novels were never in touch with my actual life, they seem now as if they were written by a ghost of their time.  It is to strangers from strange places that I owe the most sympathetic recognition.  Some have come to me, and from many I have had letters that warmed my heart, and cheered my mind.  Beside the name of Mr. Lowell, I mention two New England names, to spare me the fate of the prophet of the Gospel, the late Maria Louise Pool, whose lamentable death came far too early, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived to read “The Morgesons” only, and to write me a characteristic letter.  With some slight criticism, he wrote, “Pray pardon my frankness, for what is the use of saying anything, unless we say what we think?...  Otherwise it seemed to me as genuine and lifelike as anything that pen and ink can do.  There are very few books of which I take the trouble to have any opinion at all, or of which I could retain any memory so long after reading them as I do of ’The Morgesons.’”

Could better words be written for the send-off of these novels?

Elizabeth Stoddard.  New York, May 2nd, 1901.

TO MRS. KATHARINE HOOKER

OF LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

THESE NOVELS ARE DEDICATED IN GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE OF A KIND DEED

ELIZABETH STODDARD

CHAPTER I.

“That child,” said my aunt Mercy, looking at me with indigo-colored eyes, “is possessed.”

When my aunt said this I was climbing a chest of drawers, by its knobs, in order to reach the book-shelves above it, where my favorite work, “The Northern Regions,” was kept, together with “Baxter’s Saints’ Rest,” and other volumes of that sort, belonging to my mother; and those my father bought for his own reading, and which I liked, though I only caught a glimpse of their meaning by strenuous study.  To this day Sheridan’s Comedies, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, and Captain Cook’s Voyages are so mixed up in my remembrance that I am still uncertain whether it was Sterne who ate baked dog with Maria, or Sheridan who wept over a dead ass in the Sandwich Islands.