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PREFACE

A SANDBURR is a foolish, small vegetable, irritating and grievously useless. Therefore this volume of sketches is named Sandburrs. Some folk there be who apologize for the birth of a book. There’s scant propriety of it. A book is but a legless, dormant creature. The public has but to let it alone to be safe. And a book, withal! is its own punishment. Is it a bad book? the author loses. Is it very bad? the publisher loses. In any case the public is preserved. For all of which there will be no apology for SAND-BURRS. Nor will I tell what I think of it. No; this volume may make its own running, without the handicap of my apology, or the hamstringing of my criticism. There should be more than one to do the latter with the least of luck. The Bowery dialect – if it be a dialect – employed in sundry of these sketches is not an exalted literature. The stories told are true, however; so much may they have defence.

A. H. L

New York, Nov. 15, 1899.