extraordinary popularity. It has been included in the programmes of
reciters from the Murrumbidgee to the Vaal, from John O'Groat's to Land's
End, and is now being published as a separate volume in England and
America. It has been dramatised several times, and is more alive to-day
than it was when it was published nearly twenty years ago. Almost the
same may be said of The Three Commandments in the Vulgar Tongue.

It has been said that, apart from the colour, form, and setting, the
incidents of these Pierre stories might have occurred anywhere. That is
true beyond a doubt, and it exactly represents my attitude of mind. Every
human passion, every incident springing out of a human passion to-day,
had its counterpart in the time of Amenhotep. The only difference is in
the setting, is in the language or dialect which is the vehicle of
expression, and in race and character, which are the media of human
idiosyncrasy. There is nothing new in anything that one may write, except
the outer and visible variation of race, character, and country, which
reincarnates the everlasting human ego and its scena.

The atmosphere of a story or novel is what temperament is to a man.
Atmosphere cannot be created; it is not a matter of skill; it is a matter
of personality, of the power of visualisation, of feeling for the thing
which the mind sees. It has been said that my books possess atmosphere.
This has often been said when criticism has been more or less acute upon
other things; but I think that in all my experience there has never been
a critic who has not credited my books with that quality; and I should
say that Pierre and His People and A Romany of the Snows have an
atmosphere in which the beings who make the stories live seem natural to
their environment. It is this quality which gives vitality to the
characters themselves. Had I not been able to create atmosphere which
would have given naturalness to Pierre and his friends, some of the