Dedication

I. The Enchanted Ring

II.  Out of Egypt

III.  A May Morning

IV.  A Brahman

V. A New Man with an old Face

VI.  The Vagaries of Helwyse

VII.  A Quarrel

VIII.  A Collision Imminent

IX.  The Voice of Darkness

X. Helwyse Resists the Devil

XI.  A Dead Weight

XII.  More Vagaries

XIII.  Through a Glass

XIV.  The Tower of Babel

XV.  Charon’s Ferry

XVI.  Legend and Chronicle

XVII.  Face to Face

XVIII.  The Hoopoe and the Crocodile

XIX.  Before Sundown

XX.  Between Waking and Sleeping

XXI.  We Pick Up Another Thread

XXII.  Heart and Head

XXIII.  Balder Tells an Untruth

XXIV.  Uncle Hiero at Last

XXV.  The Happiness of Man

XXVI.  Music and Madness

XXVII.  Peace and Good-will

XXVIII.  Betrothal

XXIX.  A Chamber of the Heart

XXX.  Dandelions

XXXI.  Married

XXXII.  Shut In

XXXIII.  The Black Cloud

DEDICATION

To Robert Carter, ESQ.

Not the intrinsic merits of this story embolden me to inscribe it to you, my dear friend, but the fact that you, more than any other man, are responsible for its writing.  Your advice and encouragement first led me to book-making; so it is only fair that you should partake of whatever obloquy (or honor) the practice may bring upon me.

The ensuing pages may incline you to suspect their author of a repugnance to unvarnished truth; but,—­without prejudice to Othello,—­since varnish brings out in wood veins of beauty invisible before the application, why not also in the sober facts of life?  When the transparent artifice has been penetrated, the familiar substance underneath will be greeted none the less kindly; nay, the observer will perhaps regard the disguise as an oblique compliment to his powers of insight, and his attention may thus be better secured than had the subject worn its every-day dress.  Seriously, the most matter-of-fact life has moods when the light of romance seems to gild its earthen chimney-pots into fairy minarets; and, were the story-teller but sure of laying his hands upon the true gold, perhaps the more his story had of it, the better.

Here, however, comes in the grand difficulty; fact nor fancy is often reproduced in true colors; and while attempting justly to combine life’s elements, the writer has to beware that they be not mere cheap imitations thereof.  Not seldom does it happen that what he proffers as genuine arcana of imagination and philosophy affects the reader as a dose of Hieroglyphics and Balderdash.  Nevertheless, the first duty of the fiction-monger—­no less than of the photographic