or girls of the city."

TO JOHN S. SUMNER

(_Agent of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice_)

For no short while my indebtedness to you has been such as to require
some sort of public acknowledgment, which may now, I think, be
tendered most appropriately by inscribing upon the dedication page of
this small volume the name to which you are daily adding in
significance.

It is a tribute, however trivial, which serves at least to express my
appreciation of your zeal in re-establishing what seemed to the less
optimistic a lost cause. I may to-day confess without much
embarrassment that after fifteen years of foiled endeavors my
(various) publishers and I had virtually decided that the printing of
my books was not likely ever to come under the head of a business
venture, but was more properly describable as a rather costly form of
dissipation. People here and there would praise, but until you,
unsolicited, had volunteered to make me known to the general public,
nobody seemed appreciably moved to purchase.

One by one my books had "fallen dead" with disheartening monotony:
then--through what motive it would savor of ingratitude to
inquire,--you came to remedy all this in the manner of a philanthropic
sorcerer, brandishing everywhither your vivifying wand, and the dead
lived again. At once, they tell me, the patrons of bookstores began to
ask, not only in whispers for the _Jurgen_ which you had everywhere so
glowingly advertised, but with frank curiosity for "some of the
fellow's other books."

Whereon we of course began to "reprint," with, I rejoice to say,
results which have been very generally acceptable. Barring a few
complaints as to the exiguousness of my writing's salacity,--a
salacity which even I confess you amiably exaggerated in attributing
to my literary manner all qualities which the average reader most
desires in novelists,--there has proved to be in point of fact, as my
publishers and I had dubiously believed for years, a gratifying number
of persons, living dispersedly about America, prepared to like my
books when these books were brought to their attention. The difficulty
had been that we did not know how to reach these widely scattered,
congenial readers. But you--like Sir James Barrie's hero--"found a
way."

I cannot say, in candor, that your method of exegetical criticism has
always and in every respect appealed to me. Its applicability, for one
thing, seems so universal that i