PREFACE.

Four years ago, my uncle, the Rev. Dr. Smith of Biggar, asked me to give a lecture in my native village, the shrewd little capital of the Upper Ward.  I never lectured before; I have no turn for it; but Avunculus was urgent, and I had an odd sort of desire to say something to these strong-brained, primitive people of my youth, who were boys and girls when I left them.  I could think of nothing to give them.  At last I said to myself, “I’ll tell them Ailie’s story.”  I had often told it to myself; indeed, it came on me at intervals almost painfully, as if demanding to be told, as if I heard Rab whining at the door to get in or out,—­

      “Whispering how meek and gentle he could be,”—­

or as if James was entreating me on his death-bed to tell all the world what his Ailie was.  But it was easier said than done.  I tried it over and over, in vain.  At last, after a happy dinner at Hanley—­why are the dinners always happy at Hanley?—­and a drive home alone through

      “The gleam, the shadow, and the peace supreme”

of a midsummer night, I sat down about twelve and rose at four, having finished it.  I slunk off to bed, satisfied and cold.  I don’t think I made almost any changes in it.  I read it to the Biggar folk in the school-house, very frightened, and felt I was reading it ill, and their honest faces intimated as much in their affectionate puzzled looks.  I gave it on my return home to some friends, who liked the story; and the first idea was to print it, as now, with illustrations, on the principle of Rogers’s joke, “that it would be dished except for the plates.”

But I got afraid of the public, and paused.  Meanwhile, some good friend said Rab might be thrown in among the other idle hours, and so he was; and it is a great pleasure to me to think how many new friends he got.

I was at Biggar the other day, and some of the good folks told me, with a grave smile peculiar to that region, that when Rab came to them in print he was so good that they wouldn’t believe he was the same Rab I had delivered in the school-room,—­a testimony to my vocal powers of impressing the multitude somewhat conclusive.

I need not add that this little story is, in all essentials, true, though, if I were Shakespeare, it might be curious to point out where Phantasy tried her hand, sometimes where least suspected.

It has been objected to it as a work of art that there is too much pain; and many have said to me, with some bitterness, “Why did you make me suffer so?” But I think of my father’s answer when I told him this:  “And why shouldn’t they suffer?  She suffered; it will do them good; for pity, genuine pity, is, as old Aristotle says, ‘of power to purge the mind.’” And though in all works of art there should be a plus of delectation, the ultimate overcoming of evil and sorrow by good and joy,—­the end of all art being pleasure,—­whatsoever things are lovely first, and things that are true and of good report afterwards in their turn,—­still there is a pleasure, one of the strangest and strongest in our nature, in imaginative suffering with and for others,—­