son that I have put the story into the
mouth of a young man and made of it what the reader will see. The
existence of the brute was a fact. The end of the brute as related in
the story is also a fact, well-known at the time though it really
happened to another ship, of great beauty of form and of blameless
character, which certainly deserved a better fate. I have unscrupulously
adapted it to the needs of my story thinking that I had there something
in the nature of poetical justice. I hope that little villainy will not
cast a shadow upon the general honesty of my proceedings as a writer of
tales.

Of The Informer and The Anarchist I will say next to nothing. The
pedigree of these tales is hopelessly complicated and not worth
disentangling at this distance of time. I found them and here they are.
The discriminating reader will guess that I have found them within my
mind; but how they or their elements came in there I have forgotten for
the most part; and for the rest I really don't see why I should give
myself away more than I have done already.

It remains for me only now to mention The Duel, the longest story in the
book. That story attained the dignity of publication all by itself in a
small illustrated volume, under the title, "The Point of Honour." That
was many years ago. It has been since reinstated in its proper place,
which is the place it occupies in this volume, in all the subsequent
editions of my work. Its pedigree is extremely simple. It springs from a
ten-line paragraph in a small provincial paper published in the South of
France. That paragraph, occasioned by a duel with a fatal ending between
two well-known Parisian personalities, referred for some reason or
other to the "well-known fact" of two officers in Napoleon's Grand Army
having fought a series of duels in the midst of great wars and on some
futile pretext. The pretext was never disclosed. I had therefore to
invent it; and I think that, given the character of the two officers
which I had to invent, too, I have made it sufficiently convincing by
the mere force of its absurdity. The truth is that in my mind the story
is nothing but a serious and even earnest attempt at a bit of historical
fiction. I had heard in my boyhood a good deal of the great Napoleonic
legend. I had a genuine feeling that I would find myself at home in it,
and The Duel is the result of that feeling, or, if the reader prefers,
of that presumption. Personally I have no qualms o