If there is one truth in relation to the craft of fiction of which I am more convinced than another, it is that all the genuine and original observation of which a man is capable is made in very early life. There are two very obvious reasons why this should be so. The fact that they are obvious need not prevent me from stating them here, since I am not writing for those who make a business of knowing such things. In the first place, the mind is at its freshest; and all objects within its scope have a keen-edged interest, which wears away in later life. In the next place, the earliest observations are our own, unmixed with the conclusions and prepossessions of other minds. A child has not learnt the Dickens’ fashion, or the Thackeray fashion, or the Superior Person fashion of surveying particulars and generals. He has not begun to obscure his intelligence by the vicious habit of purposed note-takings for literary uses. He looks at the things which interest him simply, naturally, and with entire absorption. It is true of the most commonplace people that as they grow old their minds turn back to childhood, and they remember the things of half a century ago with more clearness than the affairs of last week. Lord Lytton’s definition of a man of genius was that he preserved the child’s capacity for wonder. One of the astutest of living critics tells me that he finds a curiously _logical_ characteristic in Mr. Barrie’s humour, but I confess that I am not wholly clear as to his meaning. I find it characteristically Scotch, and perhaps at bottom we mean the same thing. It is often sly, and so conscious in its enjoyment of itself as to be content to remain unseen. Often it lies in a flavour of the mind, as in whole pages of ‘My Lady Nicotine,’ where it is a mere placid, lazy acquiescence in the generally humorous aspect of things. Here the writer finds himself amused, and so may you if you happen to be in the mood. At other times the fun bubbles with pure spontaneity, as in the courtship of ‘Tnowhead’s Bell, which is, I make bold to believe, as good a bit of Scotch rural comedy as we have had for many a day. The comedy is broad, and touches the edge of farce at times, but it is always kept on the hither-side by its droll appreciation of character, and an air of complete gravity in the narrator, who, for any indication he gives to the contrary, might be dealing with the most serious of chronicles.