for I did n't drag my father
beyond this tree." [The original version of this often-repeated story
may be found in Aristotle's Ethics, Book 7th, Chapter 7th.] I have
attempted to show the successive evolution of some inherited qualities
in the character of Myrtle Hazard, not so obtrusively as to disturb the
narrative, but plainly enough to be kept in sight by the small class of
preface-readers.

If I called these two stories Studies of the Reflex Function in its
higher sphere, I should frighten away all but the professors and the
learned ladies. If I should proclaim that they were protests against
the scholastic tendency to shift the total responsibility of all human
action from the Infinite to the finite, I might alarm the jealousy of
the cabinet-keepers of our doctrinal museums. By saying nothing
about it, the large majority of those whom my book reaches, not being
preface-readers, will never suspect anything to harm them beyond the
simple facts of the narrative.

Should any professional alarmist choose to confound the doctrine of
limited responsibility with that which denies the existence of any
self-determining power, he may be presumed to belong to the class of
intellectual half-breeds, of which we have many representatives in our
new country, wearing the garb of civilization, and even the gown of
scholarship. If we cannot follow the automatic machinery of nature into
the mental and moral world, where it plays its part as much as in the
bodily functions, without being accused of laying "all that we are evil
in to a divine thrusting on," we had better return at once to our
old demonology, and reinstate the Leader of the Lower House in his
time-honored prerogatives.

As fiction sometimes seems stranger than truth, a few words may
be needed here to make some of my characters and statements appear
probable. The long-pending question involving a property which had
become in the mean time of immense value finds its parallel in the great
De Haro land-case, decided in the Supreme Court while this story was in
progress (May 14th, 1867). The experiment of breaking the child's
will by imprisonment and fasting is borrowed from a famous incident,
happening long before the case lately before one of the courts of
a neighboring Commonwealth, where a little girl was beaten to death
because she would not say her prayers. The mental state involving utter
confusion of different generations in a person yet capable of forming
a cor