I have only to add that in editing the MS. I have deemed it expedient to omit here and there a few passages which might perhaps tend to prejudice the reader against A---- B---- himself; the fact being patent to me that the author, after some years of residence in another and a wholly diverse moral and physical atmosphere, has somehow imbibed notions and theories that may clash with some of the recognised conventions and standards of this our world, which was also once his own. These omissions do not however mar the general trend of the narrative; and if any authorised persons may conceive a serious desire to peruse these excerpts, I shall willingly acquaint them with what is missing from the text. PART ONE I I begin my manuscript in the palace of the Child of the Sun in a distant world, thus relieving a mind that is apt to grow weary of mere splendour and adulation by imagining the possibility of communicating on some future day with those who were not so long ago my fellow-men and fellow-mortals on the planet I have left, never to return. Though brightness and beauty are around me in my new abode, yet a constant longing for the drab unattainable past grips me with a feverish eagerness, so that I find some small solace in placing on record from time to time my impressions of a place and a people whose existence I had never suspected until a few hours before I was hurried, a humble subject out of the Earth, to dwell as ruler of an alien sphere. Whether or no I shall ever gain the opportunity of committing this message to its desired goal I know not; but at the present moment it suits my fancy and soothes my unquiet brain to believe in the ultimate feasibility of such an event. So I shall open by relating with the utmost brevity the earlier and earthly, and therefore less interesting, portion of my career. I had already passed by some few years the age of forty, at which landmark of life, so Count Alfieri discovered long ago, man ceases to cherish illusions, and seeks to look back upon the irredeemable past with feelings of self-satisfaction or of regret, as his case may be. My own reflections after passing this Rubicon of time were anything but agreeable, when I paused to consider the years that had slipped by between my period of youth and that of middle age, and had to confess that all my early ambitions had petered out in nothingness. I had signally failed in all things; I had plainly proved myself "too weak to put my shoulder to the wheel Which Fortune offers all to push or leave."