E-text prepared by Mark C. Orton and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by the Google Books Library Project (http://books.google.com)
Note: Images of the original pages are available through the the Google Books Library Project. See http://www.google.com/books?id=w7IWAAAAYAAJ
AUTHOR OF "WHEN IT WAS DARK," "FIRST IT WAS ORDAINED," "MADE IN HIS IMAGE," ETC., ETC.
COPYRIGHT, 1911 BY STURGIS & WALTON COMPANY
Transcriber's Note: Inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation have been retained as printed. The cover of this ebook was created by the transcriber and is hereby placed in the public domain.
It is more than a year ago now that I asked you to accept the dedication of this story. It was on an evening when I was staying with you at your Yorkshire house and we had just come in from shooting.
But I discussed the tale with you long before that. It was either--as well as I can remember--at my place in the Isle of Wight, or when we were all together in the Italian Alps. I like to think that it was at that time I first asked your opinion and advice about this book upon which I have laboured so long.
One night comes back to me very vividly--yes, that surely was the night. Dinner was over. We were sitting in front of the brilliantly lit hotel with coffee and cigarettes. You had met all my kind Italian friends. Our wives were sitting together at one little table with Signora Maerdi and Madame Riva Monico--to whom be greeting! My father was at ours, and happy as a boy for all his white beard and skull-cap of black velvet.
Your son, Dick, was dancing with the Italian girls in the bright salon behind us, and the piano music tinkled out into the hot night. The Alpine woods of ilex and pine rose up in the moonlight to where the snow-capped mountains of St. Gothard hung glistening silver-green.
I ask you to take this book as a memorial of a happy, uninterrupted and dignified friendship, not less valuable and gracious because your wife and mine are friends also.
_Nil ego contulerim jucundo sanus amico!_
The sixth chapter in the third book of this story can hardly be called fiction. The notes upon which it is founded were placed in my possession by a brilliant man of letters some short time before he died. Serious students of the psychology of the Inebriate may use the document certain that it is genuine.