thousand times. Good morrow. Softly, softly. I beg that there may be no undue haste or sharp conclusions; there is something more to come. Sit you down and listen patiently. Was there ever an epic that was not continued? Did not the Rhapsodists of Cos piece together the _Odyssey_ after their successful _Iliad_? Did not Dionysius Paracelsus write a tail to the _Æneid_? Was not the _Chanson de Roland_ followed by the _Four Sons of Aymon_? Could Southey have been content with Thalaba had he not proceeded to write the adventures in America of William ap Williams, or some other Welshman whose name I forget? Eh? Well, in precisely the same manner, I propose to add a second and completing narrative to this of Mr. Thorpe’s accident; so let us have no grumbling. And to understand what kind of thing followed his fall into the water, I must explain to you that nothing had ever happened to Mr. Thorpe before; he had never sailed a boat, never ridden a horse, never had a fight, never written a book, never climbed a mountain--indeed, I might have set out in a long litany, covering several pages, the startling, adventurous, and dare-devil things that Mr. Thorpe had never done; and were I to space out my work so, I should be well in the fashion, for does not the immortal Kipling (who is paid by the line) repeat his own lines half-a-dozen times over, and use in profusion the lines of well-known ballads? He does; and so have I therefore the right to space and stretch my work in whatever fashion will spin out the space most fully; and if I do not do so, it is because I am as eager as you can possibly be to get to the end of this chronicle.