Читать книгу The Crystal Button - Chauncey Thomas - Страница 4

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Years ago, being unduly engrossed by business cares, the writer became aware that some sort of recreation was an immediate necessity. What should it be? It must be something with force enough to lift me out of the ruts of everyday life, and away from its uncompromising facts, its obstacles to be overcome, and its sloughs of anxiety in which I was otherwise liable to flounder. Reading, both heavy and light, had already served a good turn as a sedative, but this proved too mild treatment as a means of diverting a preoccupied mind.

Heroic measures were finally determined upon in the form of close study, designed as a counter-irritant. A congenial subject was chosen: the material and mechanical possibilities of the future. Here was a field of inquiry limitless, and with scarcely a footprint. Here, the inventor could experiment on the largest scale, with no expense for models or patent-rights, and become completely absorbed in his self-imposed task, with no one to criticise his schemes. The plan worked admirably. An ideal world was thus opened, into which the imagination could enter at any time and wander serenely amid the glittering sights of a wonderland ever new, and with ever shifting scenes.

This agreeable labor occupied many leisure hours between the years 1872 and 1878, within which period the substance of the chapters now gathered together in the form of a connected narrative was gradually committed to paper. Why it was not published at the time of its completion in 1878, and why, at last, it is now offered with some hope that it may tempt the appetite of a certain class of readers, even though already surfeited by imaginative literature, are points that will be fully explained in the accompanying letter by the Editor, on whose shoulders rests much of the responsibility for the appearance of the story at this time and in its present form.

Chauncey Thomas. Boston, Mass., March 3, 1890.