I turn over my chapters, torn rags of colour loosely patched together, and then look back to my dream, that gorgeous thing that for these five years past has glittered and swung before me. I look from one to the other and back again, and am almost ready to tear up the book in order to regain the delightful possession of the dream. It was a task to be taken up reverently and with love; and indeed these are the only qualifications I can honestly claim. But it needed far more. Now that I have done my best, I look at the result and am afraid. I hate, like I hate the tourists in Notre Dame, impertinent little books on splendid subjects. With my heart in my mouth I ask myself if I have made one. * * * * * Impertinent or no, my book is very vulnerable, and since it is my own I must defend it, so far as that is possible, by defining my intentions. The chapters are, as I meant them be, threaded like beads along the history of the art, and it is very easy to quarrel not only with the beads, but also with the spaces between them. There is no one who reads the book who will not find somewhere a space where he would have had a gleaming bead, a bead, where he would have had a contemptuous space. I could not put everything in; but have left material for many complementary volumes. It would perhaps be possible, writing only of authors I have not considered, to produce a history of story-telling no more incomplete than this. But it will be found, and the fact is perhaps my justification, that few of my omissions have been made by accident. In order to have the satisfaction of coming to an end at all, I had to seek the closest limits, and those limits, once chosen, barred, to my own surprise, more than one great story-teller from any detailed discussion.