still remain some mysteries
unexplainable until the end of this narration, and even some impossible
to elucidate until the close of the war and the re-union of Northern and
Southern society on the old basis, makes it possible to reveal all that
may have occurred during the conflict.

There are two modes in which romances can be written. The first, and
perhaps the more popular, is that in which no bound whatever is set by
either probability or conscience--in which the narrator assumes to know
what never could be known except to an omniscient being, and to describe
such circumstances as never could have occurred in any world under the
same general regulations as our own. To this writer, no doors are
barred, and from him the secret of no heart can be hidden. He has no
difficulty whatever in retracing the path of history, back to the days
of Michael Paleologus or Timour the Tartar, and describing the viands
set upon their tables and the thoughts that may have entered their
brains; while in events of the present day he finds no more trouble in
describing circumstantially the last moments of a traveller dying alone
at the North Pole or in the midst of the most trackless waste of Sahara.
The manner in which he became possessed of the facts narrated, is held
to be a matter of very little consequence; and if he lacks the
opportunity of calling other witnesses or surrounding circumstances to
corroborate him, he at least is removed from the fear of any
authoritative contradiction. The reader, of course, would sometimes be
grateful for a little insight into what is so impenetrably hidden; and
if the links binding the narrator to his subject were made a little
plainer to the naked eye, perhaps more general satisfaction might be
given. When, for instance, in the "Legend of the Terrible Tower," Sir
Bronzeface the Implacable is shown as threatening the Lady Charmengarde
with the most cruel tortures his slighted love and growing hate can
devise--when the very words of that atrocious monster are set down as
carefully as if they had been taken from his lips by the rapid pencil of
the stenographer--and when in the context we learn that in the midst of
his threatenings, the thousand barrels of gunpowder secretly stored in
another part of the castle for the purpose of arming a million of
retainers to make a deadly onslaught on the stronghold of his hated
rival the Lord of Hardcheek, suddenly takes fire, and the castle, with
both the interlo