feel confident that he shall not disappoint any expectations raised by
the programme. Tragedies dripping with gore, comedies piled up with
horrors, tales of heads taken off in secret have been confided to him.
If any reader has not had enough of the ghastly tales served up to the
public for some time past, he has only to express his wish; the author
is in a position to reveal cold-blooded atrocities and family secrets
of a gloomy and astonishing nature. But in preference he has chosen
those pleasanter stories in which stormy passions are succeeded by
purer scenes, where the beauty and goodness of woman shine out the
brighter for the darkness. And, to the honor of the Thirteen, such
episodes as these are not wanting. Some day perhaps it may be thought
worth while to give their whole history to the world; in which case it
might form a pendant to the history of the buccaneers--that race apart
so curiously energetic, so attractive in spite of their crimes.

When a writer has a true story to tell, he should scorn to turn it
into a sort of puzzle toy, after the manner of those novelists who
take their reader for a walk through one cavern after another to show
him a dried-up corpse at the end of the fourth volume, and inform him,
by way of conclusion, that he has been frightened all along by a door
hidden somewhere or other behind some tapestry; or a dead body, left
by inadvertence, under the floor. So the present chronicler, in spite
of his objection to prefaces, felt bound to introduce his fragment by
a few remarks.

_Ferragus_, the first episode, is connected by invisible links with
the history of the Thirteen, for the power which they acquired in a
natural manner provides the apparently supernatural machinery.

Again, although a certain literary coquetry may be permissible to