A Sheaf

This volume is but a garnering of non-creative writings; mostly pleas of some sort or other—wild oats of a novelist, which he has been asked to bind up. He cannot say that he had any wanton pleasure in sowing any of them; and lest there be others of the same opinion as the anonymous gentleman who thus joyously addressed him last July: “But there—I suppose you are getting a bit out of it. Men of your calibre will do anything for filthy lucre—you old and cunning reptile!”—he mentions that he has not, personally, profited a penny by anything in this volume, and that the future proceeds therefrom will be given to St. Dunstan’s, and the National Institute for the Blind, London.

In these days of manifold human misery, many will be impatient reading some of the pleas written before the war; but the war will not last for ever, and in the peace that follows life will be rougher, the need for those pleas even more insistent than it was.

The writings have been pruned a little, and a few have not yet met the public eye.

To the many Editors of Journals and Reviews wherein the others have appeared—cordial thanks.

J. G.

August, 1916.