I was born of parents who, though not poor, were respectable, and I had also the additional distinction of being a precocious child.  I differed from most precocious children, however, in not dying young, and that opportunity, once let slip, is now forever gone.  I believe the precocious children who do not die young develop into idiots.  My family have never been without well-grounded fears in that line.

Nothing of any importance happened to me after I was born till I grew up and wrote a book.  Indeed, I believe I may say even that never happened, for I did not write a book.  Rather a book came to pass,—­somewhat like the goldsmithery of Aaron, who threw the ear-rings into the fire, and “there came out this calf”!  I went out one day alone, as was my wont, in an open boat, and drifted beyond sight of land.  I had heard that shipwrecked mariners sometimes throw out a bottle of papers to give posterity a clue to their fate.  I threw out a bottle of papers, less out of regard to posterity than to myself.  They floated into a printing-press, stiffened themselves, and came forth a book, whereon I sailed safely ashore, grateful.  Alas, in another confusion will there be another resource?

It is this book which is to form the first, and quite possibly the last chapter of my life and sufferings, for I don’t suppose anything will ever happen to me again.  To be sure, in the book I have just been reading a girl marries her groom, leaves him, rejects two lovers, kills her husband, accepts one lover, loses him, marries the second, first husband comes to light again and is shot, marries second husband over again, and goes a-journeying with second husband and first lover, first cousin and two children, in the South of France, before she is twenty-two years old.  But in my country girls think themselves extremely well off for adventures with one marriage and no murder.  But then the girls in my country do not have the murderous black eyes which shine so in romances.

My book being fairly wound up and set a-going, of course you wish to know what came of it.  Don’t pretend you don’t care, for you know you do.  Only don’t look at me too closely, or you will disconcert me.  Veil now and then your intent eyes, or my story will surely droop under their steadfastness.  Look sometimes into yonder sunset sky and the beautiful reticulations drawn darkly against its glowing sheets of color.  You will none the less listen, and I shall all the more enjoy.

You have read much about the anxieties, the forebodings, the anticipatory tremors of new authors.  So have I, but I never felt them,—­not a single foreboding.  I was delighted to write a book, and it never occurred to me that everybody would not be just as delighted to read it.  The first time my book weighed on me was one morning when a thin, meagre little letter came to me, which turned out to be only a card bearing the laconic inscription,—­

“Twelve copies ‘New Sun’ sent by express, with the compliments of the Publishers.”