What is specifically my own in these tales, and what little I am indebted for to my good friends, I leave to such as may be curious, to determine for themselves. It must now suffice them (for in the experiment of "book-making" I have nearly lost my best patience--amidst its multiplicity of perplexities; its "proof-reading," the awful blunders of the printers, the "bungling" of the mails, the calls for "more copy" at inopportune moments, etc., etc.)--it must suffice them, I repeat, simply to know, that whatever experiences here recited are not my own, are equally authentic with mine, and, in my judgment, add to the merits of "Knots Untied" (if merits it has) rather than detract therefrom. So, since it cannot be that the reader will peruse my book for my sake, but for the book's sake and for his own, let him thank me for whatever "clearer light" I have accepted from others for his benefit. It was only at the instance--I might properly say by the repeated importunity--of certain partial friends of mine, that I was first induced to put into readable form some of the notes of my experiences and observations, particularly those running through a period of a dozen years of official life, preceded by a dozen more of a quasi-official character. I would remark here, that no chronological order has been observed in the collation of the tales composing "Knots Untied." Having, from my early days, been interested with various sociological problems, it has been my wont to fix in memoranda, of one form or another, such data as I conceived worthy, as simple statistics or eccentric facts, bearing upon the great general question of human suffering and crime, and their causes, and the means of their depiction, and final extinction also (as I firmly believe) in "the good time coming," when Science shall have ripened the paltry and distracted civilization of the present into that enlightenment in which alone the race should be contented to live,--in which only, in truth, they can be fully content with existence,--and which the now subject classes could, if they were wise enough to know their rights and their power, command in concert, for themselves, and the ruling classes as well. And these partial friends of mine have thought I might do some good, and that I ought to, however little it may prove, to the cause of human happiness,--in the intent thereby of enlarging the security of the innocent from the machinations of the depraved,--by the detail of certain wily "offences against the law and good order of society," while demonstrating therein how sure of final discovery and punishment are the criminally vicious, however crafty and subtle, in these days, when the art of police detection has become almost an exact science.