deception attained, that more than once I have found myself
trying to explain why this person should have done that, and by what
impulse that other was led into something else. In fact, I have
found that there are conditions of the mind in which purely imaginary
creations assume the characters of actual people, and act positively as
though they were independent of the will that invented them.

Of the strange manner in which imagination can thus assume the mastery,
and for a while at least have command over the mind, I cannot give a
stronger instance within my own experience than the mode in which this
story was first conceived.

When I began I intended that the action should be carried on in the
land where the tale opened. The scene on every side of me had shed its
influence, the air was weighty with the perfume of the lime and the
orange. To days of dazzling brilliancy there succeeded nights of
tropical splendor; with stars of almost preternatural magnitude
streaking the calm lake with long lines of light. To people a scene
like this with the sort of characters that might befit it, was rather a
matter of necessity with me than choice, and it was then that Maritana
revealed herself to me with a charm of loveliness I have never been able
to repicture. It was there I bethought me of those passionate natures
in which climate and soil and vegetation reproduce themselves, glowing,
ardent, and voluptuous as they are. It was there my fancy loved to stray
among the changeful incidents of lives of wild adventure and wilder
passion; and to imagine the strange discords that could be evoked
between the traits of a land that recalled Paradise and the natures that
were only angelic in the fall.

I cannot trust to my memory to remind me of the sort of tale I meaned to
write. I know there was to have been a perfect avalanche of adventure on
land and on sea. I know that through a stormy period of daily peril and
excitement, the traits of the Northern temperament in Roland himself
were to have asserted their superiority over his more impulsive
comrades; I know he was to have won that girl's love against a rivalry
that set life in the issue; and I have a vague impression of how such a
character might come by action and experience to develop such traits as
make men the rulers of their fellows.

Several of the situations occur to me, but not a single clew to the
story. There are even now scenes before me of prairie life and lonely
ride