Produced by Suzanne Shell, Sankar Viswanathan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net _TABOO_ _A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Saevius Nicanor, with Prolegomena, Notes, and a Preliminary Memoir_ By James Branch Cabell * * * * * _At melius fuerat non scribere, namque tacere Tutum semper erit._ * * * * * NEW YORK ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY 1921 _This edition is limited to nine hundred and twenty numbered copies, of which one hundred copies have been signed by the author._ _Copy Number __893__ Copyright, 1921, by JAMES BRANCH CABELL * * * * * Revised and reprinted, by permission of the Editors, from THE LITERARY REVIEW CONTENTS. THE DEDICATION MEMOIR OF SAEVIUS NICANOR PROLEGOMENA THE LEGEND: _How Horvendile Met Fate and Custom_ _How the Garbage-Man Came with Forks_ _How Thereupon Ensued a Legal Debate_ _How There Was Babbling in Philistia_ _How It Appeared to the Man in the Street_ COLOPHON A POSTSCRIPT * * * * * THE DEDICATION _Laudataque virtus crescit_ * * * * * "Buttons, a farthing a pair! Come, who could buy them of me? They're round and sound and pretty, And fit for girls of the city." TO JOHN S. SUMNER (_Agent of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice_) For no short while my indebtedness to you has been such as to require some sort of public acknowledgment, which may now, I think, be tendered most appropriately by inscribing upon the dedication page of this small volume the name to which you are daily adding in significance. It is a tribute, however trivial, which serves at least to express my appreciation of your zeal in re-establishing what seemed to the less optimistic a lost cause. I may to-day confess without much embarrassment that after fifteen years of foiled endeavors my (various) publishers and I had virtually decided that the printing of my books was not likely ever to come under the head of a business venture, but was more properly describable as a rather costly form of dissipation. People here and there would praise, but until you, unsolicited, had volunteered to make me known to the general public, nobody seemed appreciably moved to purchase.