because they have the same life in them.

The stories in this book have been growing together for a
long time. It is at least ten years since the first of them,
the story of The Other Wise Man, came to me; and all the
others I knew quite well by heart a good while before I could
find the time, in a hard-worked life, to write them down and
try to make them clear and true to others. It has been a slow
task, because the right word has not always been easy to find,
and I wanted to keep free from conventionality in the thought
and close to nature in the picture. It is enough to cause a
man no little shame to see how small is the fruit of so long
labour.

And yet, after all, when one wishes to write
about life, especially about that part of it which is inward,
the inwrought experience of living may be of value. And that
is a thing which one cannot get in haste, neither can it be
made to order. Patient waiting belongs to it; and rainy days
belong to it; and the best of it sometimes comes in the doing
of tasks that seem not to amount to much. So in the long run,
I suppose, while delay and failure and interruption may keep
a piece of work very small, yet in the end they enter into the
quality of it and bring it a little nearer to the real thing,
which is always more or less of a secret.

But the strangest part of it all is the way in which a
single thought, an idea, will live with a man while he works,
and take new forms from year to year, and light up the things
that he sees and hears, and lead his imagination by the hand