ipt was reached.

The customary preface is not so pleasant a place for a confidential
chat as the unconventional postscript. The real value and the true
purpose of the preface is to serve as a telephone for the writer of the
book and to bear his message to the professional book-reviewers. On the
other hand, only truly devoted readers will track the author to his
lair in a distant postscript. While it might be presumptuous for him to
talk about himself before the unknown and anonymous book-reviewers, he
cannot but be rejoiced at the chance of a gossip with his old friends,
the gentle readers.

Perhaps the present author cannot drop into conversation more easily
than by here venturing upon the expression of a purely personal
feeling--his own enjoyment in the weaving of the unsubstantial webs of
improbable adventure that fill the preceding pages. With an ironic
satisfaction was it that a writer who is not unaccustomed to be called
a mere realist here attempted fantasy, even though the results of his
effort may reveal invention only and not imagination. It may even be
that it was memory (mother of the muses) rather than invention
(daughter of necessity) which inspired the 'Primer of Imaginary
Geography.' I have an uneasy wonder whether I should ever have gone on
this voyage of discovery with Mynheer Vanderdecken, past the Bohemia
which is a desert country by the sea, if I had not in my youth been
allowed to visit 'A Virtuoso's Collection'; and yet, to the best of my
recollection, it was no recalling of Hawthorne's tale, but a casual
glance at the Carte du Pays de Tendre in a volume of Moliere, which
first set me upon collecting the material for an imaginary geography.

In the second of these little fantasies the midnight wanderer saw
certain combats famous in all literature and certain dances. Where it
was possible use was made of the actual words of the great authors who
had described these combats and these dances, the descriptions being
condensed sometimes and sometimes their rhythm being a little modified
so that they should not be out of keeping with the more pedestrian
prose by which they were accompanied. Thus, as it happens, the dances
of little Pearl and of Topsy could be set forth, fortunately, almost in
the very phrases of Hawthorne and of Mrs. Stowe, while I was forced to
describe as best I could myself the gyrations of the wife who lived in
'A Doll's House' and of her remote predecessor as a "new woman," the