Project Gutenberg's Confessions Of Con Cregan, by Charles James Lever

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Title: Confessions Of Con Cregan
An Irish Gil Blas

Author: Charles James Lever

Illustrator: Phiz.

Release Date: April 19, 2010 [EBook #32060]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONFESSIONS OF CON CREGAN ***

Produced by David Widger

CONFESSIONS OF CON CREGAN

An Irish Gil Blas

By Charles Lever

With Illustrations by Phiz.

Boston: Little, Brown, And Company. 1913

PREFACE.

An eminent apothecary of my acquaintance once told me that at each
increase to his family, he added ten per cent to the price of his drugs,
and as his quiver was full of daughters, Blackdraught, when I knew him,
was a more costly cordial than Curacoa.

To apply this to my own case, I may mention that I had a daughter born
to me about the time this story dates from, and not having at my command
the same resource as my friend the chemist, I adopted the alternative of
writing another story, to be published contemporaneously with that now
appearing,--"The Daltons;" and not to incur the reproach so natural in
criticism--of over-writing myself--I took care that the work should come
out without a name.

I am not sure that I made any attempt to disguise my style; I
was conscious of scores of blemishes--I decline to call them
mannerisms--that would betray me: but I believe I trusted most of all to
the fact that I was making my monthly appearance to the world in another
story, and with another publisher, and I had my hope that my small
duplicity would thus escape undetected.

I was aware that there was a certain amount of peril in running an
opposition coach on the line I had made in some degree my own; not to
say that it might be questionable policy to glut the public with a kind
of writing more remarkable for peculiarity than perfection.

I remember that excellent Irishman Bianconi, not the less Irish that he
was born at Lucca,--which was simply a "bull,"--once telling me that to
popularize a road on which few people were then travelling, and on which
his daily two-horse car was accustomed to go its journey, with two or at
mo