the hands of persons not in robust health.

Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these
humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to
perform the serious labours of the economist. My own experience is
exactly the other way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff
fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in
writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a
statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward
Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading
for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in
fortunate moments, few and far between. Personally, I would sooner
have written "Alice in Wonderland" than the whole Encyclopaedia
Britannica.

In regard to the present work I must disclaim at once all intentions
of trying to do anything so ridiculously easy as writing about a real
place and real people. Mariposa is not a real town. On the contrary,
it is about seventy or eighty of them. You may find them all the way
from Lake Superior to the sea, with the same square streets and the
same maple trees and the same churches and hotels, and everywhere the
sunshine of the land of hope.

Similarly, the Reverend Mr. Drone is not one person but about eight
or ten. To make him I clapped the gaiters of one ecclesiastic round
the legs of another, added the sermons of a third and the character
of a fourth, and so let him start on his way in the book to pick up
such individual attributes as he might find for himself. Mullins and
Bagshaw and Judge Pepperleigh and the rest are, it is true, personal
friends of mine. But I have known them in such a variety of forms,