The Project Gutenberg EBook of After Dark, by Wilkie Collins

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Title: After Dark

Author: Wilkie Collins

Posting Date: October 5, 2008 [EBook #1626]
Release Date: February, 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AFTER DARK ***

Produced by James Rusk

AFTER DARK

By Wilkie Collins

PREFACE TO "AFTER DARK."

I have taken some pains to string together the various stories contained
in this Volume on a single thread of interest, which, so far as I know,
has at least the merit of not having been used before.

The pages entitled "Leah's Diary" are, however, intended to fulfill
another purpose besides that of serving as the frame-work for my
collection of tales. In this part of the book, and subsequently in the
Prologues to the stories, it has been my object to give the reader one
more glimpse at that artist-life which circumstances have afforded me
peculiar opportunities of studying, and which I have already tried to
represent, under another aspect, in my fiction, "Hide-and-Seek." This
time I wish to ask some sympathy for the joys and sorrows of a poor
traveling portrait-painter--presented from his wife's point of view
in "Leah's Diary," and supposed to be briefly and simply narrated by
himself in the Prologues to the stories. I have purposely kept these
two portions of the book within certain limits; only giving, in the
one case, as much as the wife might naturally write in her diary at
intervals of household leisure; and, in the other, as much as a modest
and sensible man would be likely to say about himself and about the
characters he met with in his wanderings. If I have been so fortunate as
to make my idea intelligible by this brief and simple mode of treatment,
and if I have, at the same time, achieved the necessary object of
gathering several separate stories together as neatly-fitting parts of
one complete whole, I shall have succeeded in a design which I have for
some time past been very anxious creditably to fulfill.

Of the tales themselves, taken individually, I have only to say, by
way of necessary explanation, that "The Lady of Glenwith Grange" is now
offered to the re