, in the
case of guinea-smuggling its arduousness was further increased by the
danger of collecting the gold inland and clearing from home harbours._

_Very little, as I said, has ever been heard of this singular trade,
and for obvious reasons. In the first place it obtained only for a
comparatively small number of years, the latter part of the Great War:
the last of it belonging to the period of the_ Hundred Days. _And in
the second it was, at all times, of necessity confined to a very small
number of free-trading skippers. Of adventurous men, in stirring days,
there were of course a multitude. But few, naturally, were the men to
whose honour the custody of so much ready wealth could safely be
intrusted. "That is where," as Captain Jack says sometimes in this
book, "the 'likes of me' come in."_

_The exchange was enormously profitable. As much as thirty-two
shillings in silver value could, at one time, be obtained on the other
side of the water for an English guinea. But the shipper and broker,
in an illegal venture where contract could not be enforced, had to be
a man whose simple word was warranty--and indeed, in the case of large
consignments, this blind trust had to be extended to almost every man
of his crew. What a romance could be written upon this theme alone!_

_In the story of Adrian Landale, however, it plays but a subsidiary
part. Brave, joyous-hearted Captain Jack and his bold venture for a
fortune appear only in the drama to turn its previous course to
unforeseen channels; just as in most of our lives, the sudden
intrusion of a new strong personality--transient though it may be, a
tempest or a meteor--changes their seemingly inevitable trend to
altogether new issues._

* * * * *

_It was urged by my English publishers that, in_ "The Light of
Scarthey," _I relate two distinct love-stories and two distinct phases
of one man's life; and that it were wiser (by which word I presume was
meant more profitable) to distribute the tale between two books, one
to be a sequel to the other. Happily I would not be persuaded to cut a
fully composed canvas in two for the sake of the frames. "It is the
fate of sequels," as Stevenson said in his dedication of _Catriona_,
"to disappoint those who have waited for them." Besides, life is
essentially continuous.--It may not be inept to state a truism of this
kind in a world of novels where the climax of life, if not indeed its
very conclusio