know that the wholesome audience of the nation at large has done liberal
justice to those books. For this reason, I wait to write the second part
of "The Fallen Leaves," until the first part of the story has found its
way to the people.



Turning for a moment to the present novel, you will (I hope) find two
interesting studies of humanity in these pages.

In the character called "Jack Straw," you have the exhibition of an
enfeebled intellect, tenderly shown under its lightest and happiest
aspect, and used as a means of relief in some of the darkest scenes of
terror and suspense occurring in this story. Again, in "Madame Fontaine,"
I have endeavored to work out the interesting moral problem, which takes
for its groundwork the strongest of all instincts in a woman, the
instinct of maternal love, and traces to its solution the restraining and
purifying influence of this one virtue over an otherwise cruel, false,
and degraded nature.

The events in which these two chief personages play their parts have been
combined with all possible care, and have been derived, to the best of my
ability, from natural and simple causes. In view of the distrust which
certain readers feel, when a novelist builds his fiction on a foundation
of fact, it may not be amiss to mention (before I close these lines),
that the accessories of the scenes in the Deadhouse of Frankfort have
been studied on the spot. The published rules and ground-plans of that
curious mortuary establishment have also been laid on my desk, as aids to
memory while I was writing the closing passages of the story.