. As to the effect of a mental or moral shock on
a common mind that is quite a legitimate subject for study and
description. Mr. Burns' moral being receives a severe shock in his
relations with his late captain, and this in his diseased state turns
into a mere superstitious fancy compounded of fear and animosity. This
fact is one of the elements of the story, but there is nothing
supernatural in it, nothing so to speak from beyond the confines of this
world, which in all conscience holds enough mystery and terror in
itself.

Perhaps if I had published this tale, which I have had for a long time
in my mind, under the title of First Command, no suggestion of the
Supernatural would have been found in it by any impartial reader,
critical or otherwise. I will not consider here the origins of the
feeling in which its actual title, The Shadow-Line, occurred to my mind.
Primarily the aim of this piece of writing was the presentation of
certain facts which certainly were associated with the change from
youth, carefree and fervent, to the more self-conscious and more
poignant period of maturer life. Nobody can doubt that before the
supreme trial of a whole generation I had an acute consciousness of the
minute and insignificant character of my own obscure experience. There
could be no question here of any parallelism. That notion never entered
my head. But there was a feeling of identity, though with an enormous
difference of scale--as of one single drop measured against the bitter
and stormy immensity of an ocean. And this was very natural too. For
when we begin to meditate on the meaning of our own past it seems to
fill all the world in its profundity and its magnitude. This book was
written in the last three months of the year 1916. Of all the subjects
of which a writer of tales is more or less conscious within himself this
is the only one I found it possible to attempt at the time. The depth
and the nature of the mood with which I approached it is best expressed
perhaps in the dedication which strikes me now as a most
disproportionate thing--as another instance of the overwhelming
greatness of our own emotion to ourselves.

This much having been said I may pass on now to a few remarks about the
mere material of the story. As to locality it belongs to that part of
the Eastern Seas from which I have carried away into my writing life the
greatest number of suggestions. From my statement that I thought of this
story for a long t