It is the rainbow in the sky for me; and I have seldom seen a sky without
some bit of rainbow in it. Sometimes I can make others see it, sometimes
not; but I always like to try, and if I fail I harbor no worse thought of
them than that they have not had their eyes examined and fitted with
glasses which would at least have helped their vision.

As to the where and when of the different papers, in which I suppose
their bibliography properly lies, I need not be very exact. "The Man of
Letters as a Man of Business" was written in a hotel at Lakewood in the
May of 1892 or 1893, and pretty promptly printed in Scribner's Magazine;
"Confessions of a Summer Colonist" was done at York Harbor in the fall of
1898 for the Atlantic Monthly, and was a study of life at that pleasant
resort as it was lived-in the idyllic times of the earlier settlement,
long before motors and almost before private carriages; "American
Literary Centres," "American Literature in Exile," "Puritanism in
American Fiction," "Politics of American Authors," were, with three or
four other papers, the endeavors of the American correspondent of the
London Times's literary supplement, to enlighten the British
understanding as to our ways of thinking and writing eleven years ago,
and are here left to bear the defects of the qualities of their obsolete
actuality in the year 1899. Most of the studies and sketches are from an
extinct department of "Life and Letters" which I invented for Harper's
Weekly, and operated for a year or so toward the close of the nineteenth
century. Notable among these is the "Last Days in a Dutch Hotel," which
was written at Paris in 1897; it is rather a favorite of mine, perhaps
because I liked Holland so much; others, which more or less personally
recognize effects of sojourn in New York or excursions into New England,
are from the same department; several may be recalled by the longer-
memoried reader as papers from the "Editor's Easy Chair" in Harper's
Monthly; "Wild Flowers of the Asphalt" is the review of an ever-