A possibility has occurred to Rhodes and me that is by no means conducive, what with the care and labor that I have expended in the endeavor to be accurate in the writing of this true history, to any feeling of happiness on my part. My companion in adventure and discovery is, however, pleased to entertain the idea that it would certainly be "funny." Funny? That possibility is simply this: so very strange is the story which I tell in the pages that follow, many a reader may be disposed to set the whole thing down as fiction! And, indeed, many a reader may do just that! Fiction, forsooth! Well, if any one actually is of that opinion or belief when he has finished reading this book, all I can say is that I wish such a one had been with us there on that narrow bridge, the yawning black chasm of unknown profundity, on either side, when the angel and her demon so suddenly appeared there directly before us! I have an idea that, if he had been there, he would have wished, and have wished as hard as he had ever wished anything in his life, that the whole business would turn out to be fiction or nightmare! "Why then should witlesse man so much misweene That nothing is but that which he hath seene?" But I must hasten to bring this introduction to a close. Already I have exceeded the space that I had allotted for it, without even mentioning a number of things that I had in mind, and without having yet set down that which especially brought me to the decision to write anything prolegomenary at all. And, now that I come to it, I feel hesitant. But this will not do. In my whole narrative, there is, I am sure, but one single allusion, and that most brief--namely, _Amor ordinem nescit_--to my own heart-tragedy; and, as that allusion, even, is involved in obscurity, I will in this place and incontinently make it clear, and I do it by writing this: I would rather have, though it were but for one single hour, Drorathusa as My Only than have for a lifetime any other woman I have ever known. You will, I have no doubt, smile when you read this; you may think Eros has put me into a state very similar to the one in which the poor wight found himself of whom Burton wrote: "He wisheth himself a saddle for her to sit on, a posy for her to smell to, and it would not grieve him to be hanged if he might be strangled in her garters." Well, that busy little imp Venus's son (and he's as busy in that other world as he is in this) enjoys getting men and women into just such states of mind and heart. He moved even the rather cold-hearted Plato--I mean the great philosopher, not one of the poets so named, the philosopher who banished poets and Love himself from his Republic--the little imp moved even _him_ to write: "Thou gazest on the stars, my Life! Ah! gladly would I be Yon starry skies, with thousand eyes, that I might gaze on thee!" And I would rather have this heart-tragedy mine--have loved and lost Drorathusa--than never to have seen my lady.