A Revolutionist desired to issue an Election Address to the Working Men of Bermondsey.  The Rector of the Parish saw it at the printer’s, and came to him, much perturbed.  “Why write it in English?” he asked.  “It will only inflame the minds of the lower orders.  Why not allow me to translate it into Ciceronian Latin?  It would then be comprehensible to all University men; your logic would be duly and deliberately weighed:  and the tanners and tinkers, who are so very impressionable, would not be poisoned by it.”  “My friend,” said the Revolutionist, “it is the tanners and tinkers I want to get at.  My object is, to win this election; University graduates will not help me to win it.”

The business of the preacher is above all things to preach; but in order to preach, he must first reach his audience.  The audience in this case consists in large part of women and girls, who are most simply and easily reached by fiction.  Therefore, fiction is today the best medium for the preacher of righteousness who addresses humanity.

Why, once more, this particular name, “A Hill-top Novel”?  For something like this reason.

I am writing in my study on a heather-clad hill-top.  When I raise my eye from my sheet of foolscap, it falls upon miles and miles of broad open moorland.  My window looks out upon unsullied nature.  Everything around is fresh and pure and wholesome.  Through the open casement, the scent of the pines blows in with the breeze from the neighbouring firwood.  Keen airs sigh through the pine-needles.  Grasshoppers chirp from deep tangles of bracken.  The song of a skylark drops from the sky like soft rain in summer; in the evening, a nightjar croons to us his monotonously passionate love-wail from his perch on the gnarled boughs of the wind-swept larch that crowns the upland.  But away below in the valley, as night draws on, a lurid glare reddens the north-eastern horizon.  It marks the spot where the great wen of London heaves and festers.  Up here on the free hills, the sharp air blows in upon us, limpid and clear from a thousand leagues of open ocean; down there in the crowded town, it stagnates and ferments, polluted with the diseases and vices of centuries.

This is an urban age.  The men of the villages, alas, are leaving behind them the green fields and purple moors of their childhood, are foolishly crowding into the narrow lanes and purlieus of the great cities.  Strange decadent sins and morbid pleasures entice them thither.  But I desire in these books to utter a word once more in favour of higher and purer ideals of life and art.  Those who sicken of the foul air and lurid light of towns may still wander side by side with me on these heathery highlands.  Far, far below, the theatre and the music-hall spread their garish gas-lamps.  Let who will heed them.  But here on the open hill-top we know fresher and more wholesome delights.  Those feverish joys allure us not.  O decadents of the town, we have