the effect of discovery that I was once an industrious writer of short
stories, and that I am no longer anything of the kind. I have not written
one now for quite a long time, and in the past five or six years I have
made scarcely one a year. The bulk of the fifty or sixty tales from which
this present three-and-thirty have been chosen dates from the last
century. This edition is more definitive than I supposed when first I
arranged for it. In the presence of so conclusive an ebb and cessation an
almost obituary manner seems justifiable.

I find it a little difficult to disentangle the causes that have
restricted the flow of these inventions. It has happened, I remark, to
others as well as to myself, and in spite of the kindliest encouragement
to continue from editors and readers. There was a time when life bubbled
with short stories; they were always coming to the surface of my mind, and
it is no deliberate change of will that has thus restricted my production.
It is rather, I think, a diversion of attention to more sustained and more
exacting forms. It was my friend Mr. C.L. Hind who set that spring going.
He urged me to write short stories for the _Pall Mall Budget_, and
persuaded me by his simple and buoyant conviction that I could do what he
desired. There existed at the time only the little sketch, "The Jilting of
Jane," included in this volume--at least, that is the only tolerable
fragment of fiction I find surviving from my pre-Lewis-Hind period. But I
set myself, so encouraged, to the experiment of inventing moving and
interesting things that could be given vividly in the little space of
eight or ten such pages as this, and for a time I found it a very
entertaining pursuit indeed. Mr. Hind's indicating finger had shown me an
amusing possibility of the mind. I found that, taking almost anything as a
starting-point and letting my thoughts play about it, there would
presently come out of the darkness, in a manner quite inexplicable, some
absurd or vivid little incident more or less relevant to that initial