Now that the chief actors in the drama which I have sketched in “The Fourth Waits” are long since dead, I may confess without fear of hurting anybody’s feelings that all the incidents in this tale are absolutely true. There are plenty of witnesses to the accuracy of this statement, and I have no doubt they would, if called upon, gladly testify to almost every detail of the descriptions. No one who was present at the funeral ceremonies in Antwerp and Rome can ever forget the impression made upon him at the time; neither is any member of the little artistic circle likely to forget to the end of his days the strange sensation of superstitious awe with which the incidents of the story of the stray dog were listened to every time the subject was broached among us. The memory of this experience weighed heavily upon my mind for two or three years, and I only threw off the load after I had written the story. It is only to complete this series of confessions that I explain how this preface came to be written. I was riding home with a friend late one raw afternoon at the close of a long day’s hunting in one of the Midland counties of England, and we stopped to refresh ourselves and horses at a wayside inn called The Holly Bush. When we mounted again at the door, I reached up with my hunting crop and struck the holly bush that hung over the door as a sign. It rattled like metal, and as we rode away I said to my companion: “That wasn’t a real holly bush!” “That wasn’t real whiskey!” he replied. The memory of the mongoose story which these remarks called up cheered us more than the pause at the inn. “The mongoose story is almost the only tale that need not be explained even to a Scotchman,” my friend added. This is how I came to think of explaining the construction of my stories, and how I came to call my confessions “The Bush.” THE END. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Capillary Crime and other Stories, by F. D. Millet