I HAVE often found it hard to read a preface; much harder do I find it to-day to write one. If I do so, it is because it gives me an opportunity of owning that I have strung these my reminiscences together most unceremoniously and unsystematically. They are to be taken only as "Fragments of an Autobiography," very much on the same lines as the first volume which recorded my adventures in Bohemia with Du Maurier. If the reader, thus duly forewarned, elects to follow me over the uneven¹ road, he will, I trust, not mind a little jolting². If, however, he judges that the gaps and omissions³ in my life-story are unjustifiable, he must not be surprised should I attempt to set things right in a third volume. I should be all the more inclined to do so as there are some other fragments and segments waiting to be pieced together which are connected with the brightest days of my life.

The writing of the present chapters has often been a source of genuine pleasure to me, for I say with Bolingbroke in Richard II.: "I count myself in nothing else so happy as in a soul remembering my good friends."

And now that I have come to a full stop, I am left in that pleasant frame of mind in which I would fain believe in the proverbial kindness of the reader—that deity⁴ from times immemorial appealed to by the preface-writer,—a frame of mind unduly⁵ optimistic perhaps, but which emboldens⁶ me to hope that I may find some new friends amongst those who will care to read what I have to say about the old ones.

London, February 1899.

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