You see, it's this way: Many people, I believe, do not read the introductions, prefaces, forewords (and whatever else such things are called) to books. I always do. Perhaps this is a habit formed during a number of years spent as a professional reviewer. If you read the introduction, preface (or whatever it's called), to a book you can generally pick up pretty much what the author thought he was about when he wrote it, the points he intended to make in the work, the circumstances in which he wrote it, and so on. This is a great time and labor saving procedure. All you've got to do then is to read a bit in the volume here and there to taste the style, pick up a few errors of fact or grammar, glance at the "conclusion," where the author sums up, to see whether or not he got anywhere--and so far as you are further put out by having this book on your hands it might just as well never have been written. But I am drifting. That's one reason I can't make a speech. Never can recollect what it was I set out to say. Oh, yes! About these dedications. Less people than read prefaces, I fancy, read the dedications of books. I always read 'em. I read them when I have no intention whatever of reading the volumes which they--well, dedicate. They are fine--dedications. Better, far better, than old tombstones. But never judge a book by its dedication. I one time knew a man, of a most decidedly humorous cast of mind, who was a great spendthrift, an A 1 wastrel. He ran through everything his father left him (a very fair little fortune), and then when he had run through, in advance of that gentleman's death, everything his wife was to inherit from his father-in-law he had no means whatever. He had a daughter. Without, it was clearly evident, the least suspicion of the pleasant humor of this, he named her Hope. She was a small child. And--it's absurd, I know; but 'tis so; there was not a particle of conscious irony in it; this child's name was the one blind spot in her father's sense of the ridiculous--her parents frequently referred to her affectionately as "little Hope." So, quite so, with dedications. Whenever, or perhaps we had better say frequently, when a man writes a particularly worthless book he lays the deed (in his dedication of it) onto his wife, "without whose constant devotion," etc., etc., etc., "this work would never have come into being." Amen! Or he says that it is inscribed "To--my gentlest friend--and severest critic--my aged Grandmother." Or maybe he accuses his little daughter, "whose tiny hands have led me." Again he may say benignantly: "To--my faithful friend--Murray Hill--who made possible this volume"; or "the illumination of whose personality has lighted my way to truth."