MY DEAR STEVENSON,

You have trusted me with the
choice and arrangement of these papers, written before
you departed to the South Seas, and have asked me
to add a preface to the volume. But it is your prose
the public wish to read, not mine; and I am sure they
will willingly be spared the preface. Acknowledgments
are due in your name to the publishers of the several
magazines from which the papers are collected, viz.
Fraser's, Longman's, the Magazine of Art, and Scribner's.
I will only add, lest any reader should find the tone of
the concluding pieces less inspiriting than your wont,
that they were written under circumstances of especial
gloom and sickness. "I agree with you the lights seem
a little turned down," so you write to me now; "the
truth is I was far through, and came none too soon to
the South Seas, where I was to recover peace of body
and mind. And however low the lights, the stuff is
true...." Well, inasmuch as the South Sea sirens
have breathed new life into you, we are bound to be

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