st of the medical truths, both fact and argument, are all from
medical books far too numerous to specify. This includes the strange
fluctuations of memory in a man recovering his reason by degrees. The
behavior of the doctor's first two patients I had from a surgeon's
daughter in Pimlico. The servant-girl and her box; the purple-faced,
pig-faced Beak and his justice, are personal experience. The business of
house-renting, and the auction-room, is also personal experience.

In the nautical business I had the assistance of two practical seamen:
my brother, William Barrington Reade, and Commander Charles Edward
Reade, R.N.

In the South African business I gleaned from Mr. Day's recent handbooks;
the old handbooks; Galton's "Vacation Tourist;" "Philip Mavor; or, Life
among the Caffres;" "Fossor;" "Notes on the Cape of Good Hope," 1821;
"Scenes and Occurrences in Albany and Caffre-land," 1827; Bowler's
"South African Sketches;" "A Campaign in South Africa," Lucas; "Five
Years in Caffre-land," Mrs. Ward; etc., etc., etc. But my principal
obligation on this head is to Mr. Boyle, the author of some admirable
letters to the Daily telegraph, which he afterwards reprinted in a
delightful volume. Mr. Boyle has a painter's eye, and a writer's pen,
and if the African scenes in "A Simpleton" please my readers, I hope
they will go to the fountain-head, where they will find many more.

As to the plot and characters, they are invented.

The title, "A Simpleton," is not quite new. There is a French
play called La Niaise. But La Niaise is in reality a woman of rare
intelligence, who is taken for a simpleton by a lot of conceited fools,
and the play runs on their blunders, and her unpretending wisdom. That
is a very fine plot, which I recommend to our female novelists. My aim
in these pages has been much humbler, and is, I hope, too clear to need
explanation.

CHARLES READE.

A SIMPLETON.

CHAPTER I.

A young lady sat pricking a framed canvas in the drawing-room of Kent
Villa, a mile from Gravesend; she was making, at a cost of time and
tinted wool, a chair cover, admirably unfit to be sat upon--except by
some severe artist, bent on obliterating discordant colors. To do her
justice, her mind was not in her work; for she rustled softly with
restlessness as she sat, and she rose three times in twenty minutes, and
went to the window. Thence she looked down, over a trim flowery
lawn, and long, sloping meadows, on to the