_But my button-holed readers must be expecting me to come to the point. It is this. "A Likely Story" is an honest, if a humble, attempt to satisfy all parties--except, indeed, the last party just cited, whom I should be sorry to satisfy. It combines on one canvas the story of a family incident that is purely Victorian--though, alas, the era came to an end so shortly afterwards--with another, of the Italian cinquecento, without making any further demand on human powers of belief than that a picture is made to talk. I have also introduced a very pretty suburb, Coombe, as the residence of the earliest Victorian aunt, to my thinking, that my pen is responsible for. I like this way of shifting the responsibility off my own shoulders._ _However, it is fair to admit that the expedient of making the photographic copy talk, as well as the original, may outrage the sense of probability of some of my more matter-of-fact readers. I shall be sorry, because modification in a second edition will be difficult, if not impossible._ _If I do not succeed in pleasing both sections of my Public, I am at least certain of the approval of a very large number of readers who have found my previous productions too long. The foregoing is even less than the 100,000 words which seem to recommend themselves as the right length, per se, for a net volume. A slump from a quarter to a twentieth of a million words marks a powerful self-restraint on the part of my "cacoethes scribendi"--an essay towards conformity which seems to me to deserve recognition. I do not understand that anyone has, so far, propounded the doctrine that a story cannot be too short. If that were so the author would save himself a world of trouble by emulating the example of the unknown author of the shortest work of its kind on record--the biography of St. James the Less. But perhaps I am mistaken in supposing that Jackaminory and the Apostle were one and the same personage._ _I am personally more interested in the length of reviews than of books, in connexion with the volume mentioned just now, in which I am collecting my press-cuttings. The page of this volume is fourteen inches by eight, and three reviews thirteen inches long exactly cover it, leaving a little space for the name of the journal and the date. It is too small to accommodate more than three normal press columns in the width. So that a review thirteen inches long is from my point of view the most suitable for my books. Of course, twenty-six and thirty-nine inches are equally acceptable. The difficulty only begins when accommodation of fractions becomes necessary. I account that review ill-written which perplexes me with the need for such accommodation._ _I am prepared to accept six shilling volumes of 100,000 words, with reviews thirteen inches long, as the true and perfect image of Literature indeed._