Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and
undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master
of art as of life. An imaginative and exact rendering of authentic
memories may serve worthily that spirit of piety towards all things
human which sanctions the conceptions of a writer of tales, and the
emotions of the man reviewing his own experience.



Chapter II.

As I have said, I was unpacking my luggage after a journey from London
into Ukraine. The MS. of "Almayer's Folly"--my companion already for
some three years or more, and then in the ninth chapter of its age--was
deposited unostentatiously on the writing-table placed between two
windows. It didn't occur to me to put it away in the drawer the table
was fitted with, but my eye was attracted by the good form of the same
drawer's brass handles. Two candelabra with four candles each lighted
up festally the room which had waited so many years for the wandering
nephew. The blinds were down.

Within five hundred yards of the chair on which I sat stood the first
peasant hut of the village--part of my maternal grandfather's estate,
the only part remaining in the possession of a member of the family; and
beyond the village in the limitless blackness of a winter's night there
lay the great unfenced fields--not a flat and severe plain, but a kindly
bread-giving land of low rounded ridges, all white now, with the black
patches of timber nestling in the hollows. The road by which I had come
ran through the village with a turn just outside the gates closing the
short drive. Somebody was abroad on the deep snowtrack; a quick tinkle