Friendly Readers:  Last time I made a book I trod on some people’s corns and bunions, and they wrote me angry letters, asking, “Did you mean me?” This time, to save them the expense of a halfpenny card, I will begin my book by saying—­

    Whether I please or whether I tease,
     I’ll give you my honest mind;
    If the cap should fit, pray wear it a bit;
     If not, you can leave it behind.

No offense is meant; but if any thing in these pages should come home to a man, let him not send it next door, but get a coop for his own chickens.  What is the use of reading or hearing for other people?  We do not eat and drink for them:  why should we lend them our ears and not our mouths?  Please then, good friend, if you find a hoe on these premises, weed your own garden with it.

I was speaking with Will Shepherd the other day about our master’s old donkey, and I said, “He is so old and stubborn, he really is not worth his keep.”  “No,” said Will, “and worse still, he is so vicious that I feel sure he’ll do somebody a mischief one of these days.”  You know they say that walls have ears; we were talking rather loud, but we did not know that there were ears to haystacks.  We stared, I tell you, when we saw Joe Scroggs come from behind the stack, looking as red as a turkey-cock, and raving like mad.  He burst out swearing at Will and me, like a cat spitting at a dog.  His monkey was up and no mistake.  He’d let us know that he was as good a man as either of us, or the two put together, for the matter of that.  Talk about him in that way; he’d do—­I don’t know what.  I told old Joe we had never thought of him nor said a word about him, and he might just as well save his breath to cool his porridge, for nobody meant him any harm.  This only made him call me a liar and roar the louder.  My friend Will was walking away, holding his sides; but when he saw that Scroggs was still in a fume, he laughed outright, and turned round on him and said, “Why, Joe, we were talking about master’s old donkey, and not about you; but, upon my word, I shall never see that donkey again without thinking of Joe Scroggs.”  Joe puffed and blowed, but perhaps he thought it an awkward job, for he backed out of it, and Will and I went off to our work in rather a merry cue, for old Joe had blundered on the truth about himself for once in his life.

The aforesaid Will Shepherd has sometimes come down rather heavy upon me in his remarks, but it has done me good.  It is partly through his home-thrusts that I have come to write this new book, for he thought I was idle; perhaps I am, and perhaps I am not.  Will forgets that I have other fish to fry and tails to butter; and he does not recollect that a ploughman’s mind wants to lie fallow a little, and can’t give a crop every year.  It is hard to make rope when your hemp is all used up, or pancakes without batter, or rook pie without the birds; and so I found it hard to write more when I had said just about all I knew.  Giving much to the poor doth increase a man’s store, but it is not the same with writing; at least, I am such a poor scribe that I don’t find it come because I pull.  If your thoughts only flow by drops, you can’t pour them out in bucketfuls.