[Illustration: author's handwritten note.]


PREFACE


Dick in the Everglades is a true story. All that imagination had to
do with it was to find names for the boys and arrange a sequence of
events. Other characters, white and Indian, appear under names
similar to, or identical with their own. Any old alligator hunter,
familiar with the swamps and the Ten Thousand Islands, can follow
the course of the explorers from the text of the story. It would be
possible for two fearless boys, imbued with a love of Nature and the
wilderness, to repeat, incident by incident, the feats of the
explorers in the identical places mentioned in the story.

Many of the stories are understatements, seldom is one exaggerated.
I have been asked if it were possible for a boy to handle a manatee
in the water as one of the boys was represented as doing. I have
done it myself three times with manatees three times the size of
these in the story. In the story the manatees escaped. Two of those
which I captured were sent to the New York Aquarium, where one of
them lived for twenty months. The crocodiles which the boys sent to
the Zoological Park may be seen to-day, alive and well in the
reptile house. The frequent swamping of canoes and skiffs by
porpoises, or dolphins, tarpon and manatees are all experiences of
my own.

Aside from the Government charts which give the coast line only, the
existing maps of the scene of the story are worse than useless. In