I felt that no definitive edition of my books ought to appear--and I had
then a definitive edition in my mind--without these stories which
represented an early phase in my work. Whatever their degree of merit,
they possess freshness and individuality of outlook. Others could no
doubt have written them better, but none could have written them with
quite the same touch or turn or individuality; and, after all, what we
want in the art of fiction is not a story alone, not an incident of life
or soul simply as an incident, but the incident as seen with the eye--
and that eye as truthful and direct as possible--of one individual
personality. George Meredith and Robert Louis Stevenson might each have
chosen the same subject and the same story, and each have produced a
masterpiece, and yet the world of difference between the way it was
presented by each was the world of difference between the eyes that saw.
So I am content to let these stories speak little or much, but still to
speak for me.




CUMNER'S SON

I

THE CHOOSING OF THE MESSENGER

There was trouble at Mandakan. You could not have guessed it from
anything the eye could see. In front of the Residency two soldiers
marched up and down sleepily, mechanically, between two ten-pounders
marking the limit of their patrol; and an orderly stood at an open door,
lazily shifting his eyes from the sentinels to the black guns, which gave