Produced by Louise Hope, Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) WORKS OF ROBERT W. CHAMBERS Cardigan A King and a Few Dukes The Maid-at-Arms The Conspirators The Reckoning The Cambric Mask Lorraine The Haunts of Men Maids of Paradise Outsiders Ashes of Empire A Young Man in a Hurry The Red Republic In Search of the Unknown The King in Yellow In the Quarter The Maker of Moons The Mystery of Choice Iole FOR CHILDREN Outdoor-Land River-Land Orchard-Land Forest-Land [Illustration] [Illustration] IOLE [Illustration] [Illustration: "The little things," he continued, delicately perforating the atmosphere as though selecting a diatom.] IOLE By ROBERT W. CHAMBERS [Illustration] D. APPLETON & CO. New York MDCCCCV [Illustration] Copyright, 1905, by ROBERT W. CHAMBERS _Published May, 1905_ TO GEORGE HORACE LORIMER [Illustration] [Illustration] [Illustration] PREFACE Does anybody remember the opera of _The Inca_, and that heartbreaking episode where the Court Undertaker, in a morbid desire to increase his professional skill, deliberately accomplishes the destruction of his middle-aged relatives in order to inter them for the sake of practise? If I recollect, his dismal confession runs something like this: "It was in a bleak November When I slew them, I remember, As I caught them unawares Drinking tea in rocking-chairs." And so he talked them to death, the subject being "What Really is Art?" Afterward he was sorry-- "The squeak of a door, The creak of the floor, My horrors and fears enhance; And I wake with a scream As I hear in my dream The shrieks of my maiden aunts!" Now it is a very dreadful thing to suggest that those highly respectable pseudo-spinsters, the Sister Arts, supposedly cozily immune in their polygamous chastity (for every suitor for favor is popularly expected to be wedded to his particular art)--I repeat, it is very dreadful to suggest that these impeccable old ladies are in danger of being talked to death. But the talkers are talking and Art Nouveau rockers are rocking, and the trousers of the prophet are patched with stained glass, and it is a day of dinkiness and of thumbs. Let us find comfort in the ancient proverb: "Art talked to death shall rise again." Let us also recollect that "Dinky is as dinky does"; that "All is not Shaw that Bernards"; that "Better Yeates than Clever"; that words are so inexpensive that there is no moral crime in robbing Henry to pay James. Firmly believing all this, abjuring all atom-pickers, slab furniture, and woodchuck literature--save only the immortal verse: