In bringing this rustic complex under the category of comedy I clash, I am aware, with literary fashion, which demands that country folk should appear like toiling insects caught in the landscape as in a giant web of Fate, though why the inhabitants of Belgravia or Clapham escape this tragic convention I cannot understand. But I do not think that you, dear Aunt by adoption, see the life around you like that. Even, however, had you and I seen more gloomily, the fashionable fatalistic framework would have been clearly inconsistent with the “blandness” of your novel. Such a novel must, I conceive, begin with “once upon a time” and end with “they all lived happy ever after,” so that my task was simply to fill in the lacuna between these two points, and supply the early-Victorian mottoes, while even the material was marked out for me by Dr. Johnson’s definition of a novel as “a story mainly about love.” I am hopeful that when you come to read it (not, I trust, with a sore throat), you will admit that I have at least tried to make my dear “Jinny” really “live happy ever after,” even though—in the fierce struggle for literary survival—she is far from likely to do so. But at any rate, if only for the moment, I should be glad if I had succeeded in expressing through her my grateful appreciation of the beautiful country in which my lot, like Jinny’s, has been cast, with its many lovable customs and simple, kindly people. Your affectionate Nephew, THE AUTHOR SUSSEX _New Year 1919_ CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE PREAMBLE 1 I. BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT 4 II. JINNY ON HER ROUNDS 34 III. JINNY AT HER HOMES 70 IV. WILL ON HIS WAY 100 V. WILL AT HOME 154 VI. SUNDAY AT CHIPSTONE 195 VII. COMEDY OF CORYDON AND 234 AMARYLLIS VIII. CUPID AND CATTLE 264 IX. TWO OF A TRADE 320 X. HORSE, GROOM, AND BRIDE 357 XI. WINTER’S TALE 432 XII. WRITTEN IN WATER 472 XIII. THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE 503 JINNY THE CARRIER PREAMBLE _I’ll tell you who Time ambles withal._ “As You Like It.”