The reader must judge for himself what is the
value of various stories cited from old authors. He must decide how much
of what has been told he can accept either as having actually happened,
or as possible and more or less probable. The Author must be permitted,
however, to say here, in his personal character, and as responsible to
the students of the human mind and body, that since this story has been
in progress he has received the most startling confirmation of the
possibility of the existence of a character like that which he had drawn
as a purely imaginary conception in Elsie Venner.

BOSTON, January, 1861.

A SECOND PREFACE.

This is the story which a dear old lady, my very good friend, spoke of as
"a medicated novel," and quite properly refused to read. I was always
pleased with her discriminating criticism. It is a medicated novel, and
if she wished to read for mere amusement and helpful recreation there was
no need of troubling herself with a story written with a different end in
view.

This story has called forth so many curious inquiries that it seems worth
while to answer the more important questions which have occurred to its
readers.

In the first place, it is not based on any well-ascertained physiological
fact. There are old fables about patients who have barked like dogs or
crowed like cocks, after being bitten or wounded by those animals. There
is nothing impossible in the idea that Romulus and Remus may have imbibed
wolfish traits of character from the wet nurse the legend assigned them,
but the legend is not sound history, and the supposition is nothing more
than a speculative fancy. Still, there is a limbo of curious evidence
bearing on the subject of pre-natal influences sufficient to form the
starting-point of an imaginative composition.

The real aim, of the story was to test the doctrine of "original sin" and
human responsibility for the disordered volition coming under that
technical denomination. Was Elsie Venner, poisoned by the venom of a
crotalus before she was born, morally responsible for the "volitional"
aberrations, which translated into acts become what is known as sin, and,
it may be, what is punished as crime? If, on presentation of the
evidence, she becomes by the verdict of the human conscience a proper
object of divine pity and not of divine wrath, as a subject of moral
poisoning, wherein lies the difference between her position at the bar of
judgment, human