The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories,
by H. G. Wells

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Title: The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories

Author: H. G. Wells

Release Date: April 2, 2004 [eBook #11870]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

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THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND

And Other Stories

H. G. WELLS

[Illustration: He stopped, and then made a dash to escape from their
closing ranks.]

INTRODUCTION

The enterprise of Messrs. T. Nelson & Sons and the friendly accommodation
of Messrs. Macmillan render possible this collection in one cover of all
the short stories by me that I care for any one to read again. Except for
the two series of linked incidents that make up the bulk of the book
called _Tales of Space and Time_, no short story of mine of the
slightest merit is excluded from this volume. Many of very questionable
merit find a place; it is an inclusive and not an exclusive gathering.
And the task of selection and revision brings home to me with something of
the effect of discovery that I was once an industrious writer of short
stories, and that I am no longer anything of the kind. I have not written
one now for quite a long time, and in the past five or six years I have
made scarcely one a year. The bulk of the fifty or sixty tales from which
this present three-and-thirty have been chosen dates from the last
century. This edition is more definitive than I supposed when first I
arranged for it. In the presence of so conclusive an ebb and cessation an
almost obituary manner seems justifiable.

I find it a little difficult to disentangle the causes that have
restricted the flow of these inventions. It has happened, I remark, to
others as well as to myself, and in spite of the kindliest encouragement
to continue from editors and readers. There was a time when life bubbled
with short stories; they were always coming to the surface of my mind, and
it is no deliberate change of will that has thus restricted my production.