iled across the Atlantic.

But I was not satisfied. Through the dense jungle of preoccupying
affairs in which I was buried I could see that I was not satisfied. I
was trying to eat my cake and have it. I make no complaint. If there be
one person for whom I cherish a profound dislike it is the literary
character who whines because his circumstances hinder his writing. I
was no George Gissing, cursed with a dreary distaste of common toil and
mechanical things. I love both the Grecian Isles and gas-burners. But
for the moment I had chosen gas-burners, or rather steam engines, and I
knew I could not have both. So _Aliens_ went back to London, and I went
my daily round of the Caribbean. I felt that for once I could trust the
judgment of a first-class publisher.

The publishers of this new edition will understand me when I say that an
author has no business to trust blindly to the judgment of any house,
however first-class. He has no business to do so because that outside
estimate of his work must of necessity be based on scanty data. The
publisher, for all his enthusiasm, takes a chance, sometimes a pretty
long one. An author, as I conceive it, must be his own most uneasy,
captious, cantankerous critic. He dare not delegate this job to anyone
else, for that way lies the pot-boiler and the formal romance, the
"made" book. I was busy, and let go the reins. And I place on record
here my gratitude to those who knew enough and cared enough to recall me
to my post, that I might deal with the book afresh and do justice to the
reader.

Much happened between the day when I mailed my proofs from the big Post
Office on Canal Street in New Orleans, and the day when I set out to
write this present version. I was now in another hemisphere and the
world was at war. By a happy chance I laid hold of a copy of _Aliens_,
sent previously to a naval relative serving on the same station. Up and
down the AEgean Sea, past fields of mines and fields of asphodel, past
many an isle familiar in happier days to me, I took my book and my new
convictions about human folly. It was a slow business, for it so chanced
that my own contribution to the war involved long hours. But _Aliens_
grew.

And one evening, I remember, I left off in the middle of Mr. Carville's
courtship and went to bed. We were speeding southward. It was a dark,
moonless night. The islands of the Grecian Archipelago were roofed over
with a vault of low-lying clouds, as if those ferrif