It seems fair, too, to warn the eccentric person who shall read this preface, against putting too much faith in the account Mr. Whacker gives of himself. The astounding pedigree to which he lays claim in Chapter I. may be satire, for aught I know; but when he poses as a lawyer, a bachelor, and a ton of a man, weighing (though he does not give the exact figures) not much less than three hundred pounds, he is counting too much on the simplicity of his editor. For the internal evidence of the work itself makes it clear that he is a physician, ever so much married, and nestling amid a very grove of olive branches. He assures us, too, for example (he is never tired of assuring us of something), that he is entirely ignorant of music; yet divides his work not into books (as a Christian should), but into _movements_; indicating (presumably) the spirit and predominant feeling of each by the opening page of the orchestral score of one of the four numbers of a famous symphony! One more word and I am done. Our author has not seen fit to make any reply to the incessant, and still unceasing onslaughts, from pen and pencil alike, to which the South has submitted, and still submits, twenty-one years after Appomattox, with a silence that has been as grand as it is unparalleled. His only revenge has been to paint his people and the lives they led. But it seems to me best to say, once for all, that whenever the necessities of the narrative compel him to show his sympathies on one side or the other (as happens two or three times in the course of the story), they will be found to be with those people among whom he was born, by whose side he fought, and with whom he has suffered. And I feel sure that no man who knows me, in the South, and equally sure that no man who knows me, in the North, would deem me capable of printing this book, had it been otherwise. V. DABNEY, 108 West Forty-ninth Street, New York. April, 1886. THE STORY OF DON MIFF. CHAPTER I. 1. Long, long years before these pages shall meet thine almond eye, my Ah Yung Whack, the hand which penned them for thy delectation will have crumbled into dust. Three hundred years and more, let us say; for thou art (or shalt in due time be) my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson. 2. True, I am not yet married; but I intend to be. Nor is there any need of hurry; seeing what a singularly distant and belated relative thou art. 3.