STRANGE TRUE STORIES OF LOUISIANA.



HOW I GOT THEM.

1882-89.

True stories are not often good art. The relations and experiences of real
men and women rarely fall in such symmetrical order as to make an artistic
whole. Until they have had such treatment as we give stone in the quarry
or gems in the rough they seldom group themselves with that harmony of
values and brilliant unity of interest that result when art comes in--not
so much to transcend nature as to make nature transcend herself.

Yet I have learned to believe that good stories happen oftener than once I
thought they did. Within the last few years there have dropped into my
hands by one accident or another a number of these natural crystals, whose
charms, never the same in any two, are in each and all enough at least to
warn off all tampering of the fictionist. Happily, moreover, without being
necessary one to another, they yet have a coherent sequence, and follow
one another like the days of a week. They are mine only by right of
discovery. From various necessities of the case I am sometimes the
story-teller, and sometimes, in the reader's interest, have to abridge;
but I add no fact and trim naught of value away. Here are no unconfessed
"restorations," not one. In time, place, circumstance, in every essential
feature, I give them as I got them--strange stories that truly happened,
all partly, some wholly, in Louisiana.