| The following story, the first published by the author, was written nineteen years ago, at a time when he was feeling his way to a method. The principles observed in its composition are, no doubt, too exclusively those in which mystery, entanglement, surprise, and moral obliquity are depended on for exciting interest, but some of the scenes, and at least one of the characters, have been deemed not unworthy of a little longer preservation, and as they could hardly be reproduced in a fragmentary form the novel is reissued complete -the more readily that it has for some considerable time been reprinted and widely circulated in America. January 1889 |
