Transcribed from the 1886 Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. edition byDavid Price, email ccx074@coventry
Contents:
The End of Phæacia
In the Wrong Paradise
A Cheap Nigger
The Romance of the First Radical
A Duchess’s Secret
The House of Strange Stories
In Castle Perilous
The Great Gladstone Myth
My Friend the Beach-Comber
DEAR RIDER HAGGARD,
I have asked you to let me put your name here, that I might havethe opportunity of saying how much pleasure I owe to your romances. They make one a boy again while one is reading them; and the studentof “The Witch’s Head” and of “King Solomon’sMines” is as young, in heart, as when he hunted long ago withChingachgook and Uncas. You, who know the noble barbarian in hisAfrican retreats, appear to retain more than most men of his fresh naturalimagination. We are all savages under our white skins; but youalone recall to us the delights and terrors of the world’s nonage. We are hunters again, trappers, adventurers bold, while we study you,and the blithe barbarian wakens even in the weary person of letters. He forgets proof-sheets and papers, and the “young lion”seeks his food from God, in the fearless ancient way, with bow or rifle. Of all modern heroes of romance, the dearest to me is your faithfulZulu, and I own I cried when he bade farewell to his English master,in “The Witch’s Head.”
In the following tales the natural man takes a hand, but he is seenthrough civilized spectacles, not, as in your delightful books, withthe eyes of the sympathetic sportsman. If Why-Why and Mr. Gowlesamuse you a little, let this be my Diomedean exchange of bronze forgold—of the new Phæacia for Kukuana land, or for that hauntedcity of Kôr, in which your fair Ayesha dwells undying, as yetunknown to the future lovers of She.
Very sincerely yours,
A. LANG.
CROMER, August 29, 1886.
The writer of these apologues hopes that the Rev. Mr. Gowles willnot be regarded as his idea of a typical missionary. The countrymenof Codrington and Callaway, of Patteson and Livingstone, know betterwhat missionaries may be, and often are. But the wrong sort aswell as the right sort exists everywhere, and Mr. Gowles is not a verygross caricature of the ignorant teacher of heathendom. I am convincedthat he would have seen nothing but a set of darkened savages in theancient Greeks. The religious eccentricities of the Hellenes arenot exaggerated in “The End of Phæacia;” nay, Mr.Gowles might have seen odder things in Attica than he discovered, orchose to record, in Boothland.
To avoid the charge of plagiarism, perhaps it should be mentionedthat “The Romance of the First Radical” was written longbefore I read Tanner’s “Narrative of a Captivity among theIndians.” Tanner, like Why-Why, had trouble with the chiefmedicine-man of his community.
If my dear kinsman and companion of old days, J. J. A., reads “MyFriend the Beach-comber,” he will recognize many of his own yarns,but the portrait of the narrator is wholly fanciful.
“In Castle Perilous” and “A Cheap Nigger”are reprinted from the Cornhill Magazine; “My Friend theBeach-comber,” from Longman’s; “The Great GladstoneMyth,” from Macmillan’s; “In the Wrong Paradise,”from the Fortnightly Review; “A Duchess’s Secret,”from the Overland Mail; “The Romance of the First Radical,”from Fraser’s Magazine; and “The End of Phæacia,”from Time, by the courteous permission of the editors and proprietorsof those periodicals.
The Rev. Thomas