This species of literature has received the very appropriate name of ‘padding’—which might fitly be defined as ‘that which all can write and none can read.’ That the present volume contains _no_ such writing I dare not avow: sometimes, in order to bring a picture into its proper place, it has been necessary to eke out a page with two or three extra lines: but I can honestly say I have put in no more than I was absolutely compelled to do. My readers may perhaps like to amuse themselves by trying to detect, in a given passage, the one piece of ‘padding’ it contains. While arranging the ‘slips’ into pages, I found that the passage, which now extends from the top of p. 35 to the middle of p. 38, was 3 lines too short. I supplied the deficiency, not by interpolating a word here and a word there, but by writing in 3 consecutive lines. Now can my readers guess _which_ they are? A harder puzzle—if a harder be desired—would be to determine, as to the Gardener’s Song, in _which_ cases (if any) the stanza was adapted to the surrounding text, and in _which_ (if any) the text was adapted to the stanza. Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature—at least _I_ have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it comes—is to write anything _original_. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune. I do not know if ‘Alice in Wonderland’ was an _original_ story—I was, at least, no _conscious_ imitator in writing it—but I do know that, since it came out, something like a dozen story-books have appeared, on identically the same pattern. The path I timidly explored—believing myself to be ‘the first that ever burst into that silent sea’—is now a beaten high-road: all the way-side flowers have long ago been trampled into the dust: and it would be courting disaster for me to attempt that style again. Hence it is that, in ‘Sylvie and Bruno,’ I have striven—with I know not what success—to strike out yet another new path: be it bad or good, it is the best I can do. It is written, not for money, and not for fame, but in the hope of supplying, for the children whom I love, some thoughts that may suit those hours of innocent merriment which are the very life of Childhood; and also in the hope of suggesting, to them and to others, some thoughts that may prove, I would fain hope, not wholly out of harmony with the graver cadences of Life. If I have not already exhausted the patience of my readers, I would like to seize this opportunity—perhaps the last I shall have of addressing so many friends at once—of putting on record some ideas that have occurred to me, as to books desirable to be written—which I should much like to _attempt_, but may not ever have the time or power to carry through—in the hope that, if _I_ should fail (and the years are gliding away _very_ fast) to finish the task I have set myself, other hands may take it up.