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Only a few months before his death ‘Q’ proposed the publication of this collection of his shorter stories. He selected the candidates himself, and arranged them in the order in which they are printed in this book, under the three headings of stories, fantasias, and drolls. He did not live to read the proofs, and this part of the work has been undertaken by his widow.

No one could have been more modest than ‘Q’ about his original work—though he could be brought to admit occasionally that he had written a few decent short stories—and it is therefore significant that the supervision of this volume has been one of his last literary acts. He was as critical of his own work as he was of every one else’s, and the frequent temporary success of inferior work only served to strengthen his faith that ‘all good writing has a mysterious way of arriving, soon or late, at its own.’ The recent popular demand from the fighting forces and elsewhere for his stories of thirty and forty years ago is the best tribute to him, indeed the only one he would value.

E. F. B.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due to Messrs. Cassell, Arrowsmith, Methuen, and the author’s representatives, for permission to reprint.