I offer this precedent as an excuse for digressing at a moment when I have burned down a small settlement, dispatched a fellow being, and left my heroine alone in the company of an escaped convict who has just developed insanity as a new social quality. My object in thus digressing is to confer with the reader in regard to the evolution of this story,—a familiarity not without precedent, as I might prove from most of the old Greek comedies, whose _parabasis_ permits the poet to mingle freely with the _dramatis personae_, to address the audience and descant at length in regard to himself, his play, and his own merits. The fact is that, during the progress of this story, I have received many suggestions from intimate friends in regard to its incidents and construction. I have also been in the receipt of correspondence from distant readers, one letter of which I recall signed by an “Honest Miner,” who advises me to “do the right thing by M’liss,” or intimates somewhat obscurely that he will “bust my crust for me,” which, though complimentary in its abstract expression of interest, and implying a taste for euphonism, evinces an innate coarseness which I fear may blunt his perceptions of delicate shades and Greek outlines. Again, the practical nature of Californians and their familiarity with scenes and incidents which would be novel to other people have occasioned me great uneasiness. In the course of the last three chapters of M’liss I have received some twenty or thirty communications from different parts of the State corroborating incidents of my story, which I solemnly assure the reader is purely fictitious. Some one has lately sent me a copy of an interior paper containing an old obituary of Smith of Smith’s Pocket. Another correspondent writes to me that he was acquainted with the schoolmaster in the fall of ’49, and that they “grubbed together.” The editors of the serial in which this story appears assure me that they have received an advertisement from the landlord of the “National Hotel” contingent upon an editorial notice of its having been at one time the abode of M’liss; while an aunt of the heroine, alluding in excellent terms to the reformed character of her niece M’liss, clenches her sincerity by requesting the loan of twenty dollars to buy clothes for the desolate orphan.