lly, and should doubtless have refrained from
giving it any special attention.

"When one considers, however, the manner in which your copy was
published by the paper, deferring the explanation until the
appearance of the third instalment, it must be acknowledged that
there was opportunity for surprise and criticism. The fault should
have been found with the way in which the article was published,
rather than with the story itself, that appearing at its conclusion
a self-confessed mosaic of quotations. Needless to add that its
author's aim to amuse, entertain, and instruct has been manifestly
subserved.

"Yours most sincerely,

"---- ----"

Of another tale ('Sixteen Years without a Birthday') I have nothing to
say--except to record a friend's remark after he had finished it, that
he had "read something very like it not long before in a newspaper;" so
perhaps I may be permitted to declare that I had not read something
very like it anywhere, but had, to the best of my belief, "made it all
up out of my own head." Nor need I say anything about the 'Rival
Ghosts'--except to note that it is here reprinted from an earlier
collection of stories which has now for years been out of print.

The last tale of all, the 'Twinkling of an Eye,' received the second
prize for the best detective story, offered by a newspaper
syndicate--the first prize being taken by a story written by Miss Mary
E. Wilkins and Mr. J. E. Chamberlain. The use of the camera as a
detective agency had been suggested to me by a brief newspaper
paragraph glanced at casually several years before. And I confess that
it was with not a little amusement that I employed this device, since I
had then recently seen my 'Vignettes of Manhattan' criticized as being
"photographic in method." Here again I had no reason to doubt the
originality of my plot; and here once more was my confidence shattered,
and I was forced to confess that fiction can never hope to keep ahead
of fact.

After the 'Twinkling of an Eye' was published in the newspapers which
had joined in offering the prizes, it was printed again in one of the
smaller magazines. There it was read by a gentleman connected with a
hardware house in Grand Rapids, who wrote to me, informing me that the
story I had laboriously pieced together had--in some of its details, at
least--been anticipated by real life more than a year before I sat down
to write out my narrative