About “The Twins” a curious and somewhat awkward coincidence happened, in the fact that my totally ideal characters of General Tracey and his family were supposed to be intended for some persons whom the cap (it seems) fitted pretty accurately, and who then lived at the southern watering-place I had too diaphanously depicted as Burleigh-Singleton.  It is somewhat dangerous to invent blindly.  However, my total innocence of any intentional allusion to private matters whereof I was entirely ignorant was set clear at once by an explanatory letter; and so no harm resulted.  In the case of “Heart” similarly, I invented the bankruptcy of a certain Austral Bank, which at the time of my tale’s publication had no existence,—­the very name having been taken some years after.  This is another instance of the literary perils to which imaginative authors may be subject; for litera scripta manet, especially if in printer’s ink, and, for aught I know, that offhand word might be held a continuous libel.  For all else, by way of notice, the stories speak for themselves; as, Covetousness was the text for “The Crock of Gold,” while Concealment and False Witness are severally the morale of “The Twins” and “Heart.”  I once meditated ten tales, on the Ten Commandments, these three being an instalment; and I mentally sketched my fourth upon Idolatry, “The Prior of Marrick,” but nothing came of it.  The Decalogue hangs together as a whole, and cannot be cut into ten distinct subjects without reference to one another.

In the chapter headed “The find of the Heartless,” I find a manuscript note perhaps worth printing here: 

“If I had been gifted with the true prophetic power, hereabouts should my heartless hero have stumbled on a big nugget of gold (I wrote before the Australian gold discovery), even as the shrewd Defoe invented for his Robinson Crusoe in Juan Fernandez, where gold has not yet been found, though it may be.  However, I did not originally make the splendid guess, and will not now in a future edition surreptitiously interpolate such a suggestive incident, after the example of dishonest Murphy in his prognostic of that coldest January 7th.  It may be true enough that, for my story’s sake, I may wish I had thought of such a not unlikely find:  for the uselessness of the mere metal to a positively starving man in the desert might have furnished comment analogous to what was uttered by Timon of Athens; and would have been picturesque enough and characteristic withal.”

Here may follow a bit of notice for each tale from two critics of eminence,—­as copied from one of my Archive-books, for memory is treacherous, and I must not invent.  Of the “Crock of Gold” Mr. Ollier wrote as follows:—­