es" I have ascribed to Captain
Dangerous will be readily recognised as "strange." To some they may
appear exaggerated and distorted, to others merely strained and dull. If
truth, however, be stranger than fiction, I may plead something in
abatement; for although I am responsible for the thread of the story and
the conduct of the narrative, there is not one Fact set down as having
marked the career of the Captain that has been drawn from imagination.
For the story of Arabella Greenville, for the sketch of the Unknown
Lady, for the exploits of the "Blacks" in Charlwood Chase, for the
history of Mother Drum, for the voyage round the world, for the details
of the executions of Lord Lovat and Damiens, for the description of the
state of a Christian captive among the Moors, I am indebted, not to a
lively fancy, but to books of travel, memoirs, Acts of Parliament, and
old newspapers and magazines. I can scarcely, however, hope that,
although the incidents and the language in this book are the result of
years of weary plodding and note-taking, through hundreds of dusty
tomes, they will succeed in interesting or amusing the public now that
they have undergone the process of condensation. The house need not be
elegant because the foundations have been laboriously laid. A solid
skeleton does not always imply a beautiful skin.

It is possible, nevertheless, that many persons may cry out that what I
have written of Captain Dangerous could not have occurred, with any
reasonable amount of probability, to any one man. Let me mention the
names of a score of men and women recently or still living, and let me
ask the reader whether anything in my hero's career was stranger than
the adventures which marked theirs? Here is a penful taken at
random,--Lord Dundonald, Lola Montes, Raousset-Boulbon, Richard Burton,
Garibaldi, Felice Orsini, Ida Pfeiffer, Edgar Poe, Mr. and Mrs. Atkinson
(the Siberian travellers), Marshal St. Arnaud, Paul du Chaillu, Joseph
Wolff, Dr. Livingstone, Gordon Cumming, William Howard Russell, Robert
Houdin, Constantine Simonides, Barnum, and Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. The
life of any one of these personages, truthfully written, would be a
thousand times stranger than anything that is set down to Dangerous's
account. Let me quote one little example more in point. Two years ago I
wrote a story called the "Seven Sons of Mammon," in which there was an
ideal character--that of a fair-haired-little swindler, and presumable
m