The writing
of it was begun in the autumn of 1917 and finished in the summer of
1918. Its memory is associated with that of the darkest hour of the war,
which, in accordance with the well known proverb, preceded the dawn--the
dawn of peace.

As I look at them now, these pages, written in the days of stress and
dread, wear a look of strange serenity. They were written calmly, yet
not in cold blood, and are perhaps the only kind of pages I could have
written at that time full of menace, but also full of faith.

The subject of this book I have been carrying about with me for many
years, not so much a possession of my memory as an inherent part of
myself. It was ever present to my mind and ready to my hand, but I was
loth to touch it from a feeling of what I imagined to be mere shyness
but which in reality was a very comprehensible mistrust of myself.

In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom,
especially if it has got to be carried into the market-place. This being
the product of my private garden my reluctance can be easily understood;
though some critics have expressed their regret that I had not written
this book fifteen years earlier I do not share that opinion. If I took
it up so late in life it is because the right moment had not arrived
till then. I mean the positive feeling of it, which is a thing that
cannot be discussed. Neither will I discuss here the regrets of those
critics, which seem to me the most irrelevant thing that could have been
said in connection with literary criticism.

I never tried to conceal the origins of the subject matter of this book
which I have hesitated so long to write; but some reviewers indulged
themselves with a sense of triumph in discovering in it my Dominic of
"The Mirror of the Sea" under his own name (a truly wonderful
discovery) and in recognizing the balancelle _Tremolino_ in the unnamed
little craft in which Mr. George plied his fantastic trade and sought to
allay the pain of his incurable wound. I am not in the least
disconcerted by this display of perspicacity. It is the same man and the
same balancelle. But for the purposes of a book like "The Mirror of the
Sea" all I could make use of was the personal history of the little
_Tremolino_. The present work is not in any sense an attempt to develop
a subject lightly touched upon in former years and in connection with
quite another kind of love. What the story of the _Tremolino_ in its
anecdotic