I_ want to get at. My object is, to win this
election; University graduates will not help me to win it."

The business of the preacher is above all things to preach; but in order
to preach, he must first reach his audience. The audience in this case
consists in large part of women and girls, who are most simply and
easily reached by fiction. Therefore, fiction is today the best medium
for the preacher of righteousness who addresses humanity.

Why, once more, this particular name, "A Hill-top Novel"? For something
like this reason.

I am writing in my study on a heather-clad hill-top. When I raise my eye
from my sheet of foolscap, it falls upon miles and miles of broad open
moorland. My window looks out upon unsullied nature. Everything around
is fresh and pure and wholesome. Through the open casement, the scent of
the pines blows in with the breeze from the neighbouring firwood. Keen
airs sigh through the pine-needles. Grasshoppers chirp from deep tangles
of bracken. The song of a skylark drops from the sky like soft rain
in summer; in the evening, a nightjar croons to us his monotonously
passionate love-wail from his perch on the gnarled boughs of the
wind-swept larch that crowns the upland. But away below in the valley,
as night draws on, a lurid glare reddens the north-eastern horizon. It
marks the spot where the great wen of London heaves and festers. Up here
on the free hills, the sharp air blows in upon us, limpid and clear from
a thousand leagues of open ocean; down there in the crowded town,
it stagnates and ferments, polluted with the diseases and vices of
centuries.

This is an urban age. The men of the villages, alas, are leaving behind
them the green fields and purple moors of their childhood, are foolishly
crowding into the narrow lanes and purlieus of the great cities. Strange
decadent sins and morbid pleasures entice them thither. But I desire
in these books to utter a word once more in favour of higher and purer
ideals of life and art. Those who sicken of the foul air and lurid
light of towns may still wander side by side with me on these heathery
highlands. Far, far below, the theatre and the music-hall spread their
garish gas-lamps. Let who will heed them. But here on the open hill-top
we know fresher and more wholesome delights. Those feverish joys allure
us not. O decadents of the town, we have seen your sham idyls, your
tinsel Arcadias. We have tired of their stuffy atmosphere, their
dazzling je