ve been regarding the ultimate disposition of these papers, having
literally no other information on the point than they themselves
furnish. Needless to say they would not be published now if I had any
kind of reason to believe, or to suspect, that my friend would have
resented such a course.

But I will say that, in the writing, I do not think Freydon had
considered the question of publication. I do not think that in these
last exercises of his pen he wrote consciously for the printer and the
public. As those who know his published work are aware, he was much
given to literary allusiveness and to quotation. In these papers such
characteristic pages did occur, it is true, but in practically every
case they had been scrawled over in pencil, and have been studiously
omitted by me in my preparation of the manuscript for the press. Here
and there it was clear that entire pages had been removed and
apparently destroyed by their writer.

Again, in this record, Freydon--always in his writings for the press,
literary and journalistic, meticulous in the matter of constructive
detail--clearly gave no thought to the arrangement of chapters or
other divisions. He wrote of his life, as he has said, to enable
himself to see it as a whole. For my part I have felt a natural
delicacy about intruding so far as to introduce chapter headings or
the like. It was easy for me to note the points at which the writer
had laid aside his pen, presumably at the day's end, for there a
portion of a sheet was left blank, and sometimes a zig-zag line was
drawn. At these points then, where the writer himself paused, I have
allowed the pause to appear. And this, in effect, represents the sum
of my small contribution to the volume; for I have altered nothing,
added nothing, and taken nothing away, beyond those previously
mentioned passages (literary rather than documentary) which the
author's own pencil had marked for deletion; the removal, where these
occurred, of references to myself; and the substitution, where that
seemed desirable, of imaginary proper names for the names of actual
places and living people as written by my friend.

Two other points, and the task which for me has certainly been a
labour of love, is done.

Nicholas Freydon was perfectly correct in his belief that he might
have wooed and won the lady who is referred to in these pages as Mrs.
Oldcastle. In this, as in other episodes of his life which happen to
be known to me, the mot