The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Young Visiters or, Mr. Salteena's Plan, by
Daisy Ashford

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Title: The Young Visiters or, Mr. Salteena's Plan

Author: Daisy Ashford

Release Date: May 11, 2007 [EBook #21415]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOUNG VISITERS ***

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[Illustration: THE AUTHOR]

THE
YOUNG VISITERS
OR, MR SALTEENA'S PLAN

BY

DAISY ASHFORD

WITH A PREFACE BY
J. M. BARRIE

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

_Copyright_, 1919,
_By George H. Doran Company_

_Printed in the United States of America_

[Pg v]
PREFACE

The "owner of the copyright" guarantees that "The Young Visiters" is
the unaided effort in fiction of an authoress of nine years. "Effort,"
however, is an absurd word to use, as you may see by studying the
triumphant countenance of the child herself, which is here reproduced
as frontispiece to her sublime work. This is no portrait of a writer
who had to burn the oil at midnight (indeed there is documentary
evidence that she was hauled off to bed every evening at six): it has
an air of careless power; there is a complacency about it that by the
severe might perhaps be called smugness. It needed no effort for that
face to knock off a masterpiece. It probably represents precisely how
she looked when she finished a chapter. When she was actually at work
I think the expression [Pg vi] was more solemn, with the tongue firmly
clenched between the teeth; an unholy rapture showing as she drew near
her love chapter. Fellow-craftsmen will see that she is looking
forward to this chapter all the time.

The manuscript is in pencil in a stout little note book (twopence),
and there it has lain for years, for though the authoress was nine
when she wrote it she is now a grown woman. It has lain, in lavender
as it were, in the dumpy note book, waiting for a publisher to ride
that way and rescue it; and here he is at last, not a bit afraid that
to this age it may appear "Victorian." Indeed if its pictures of High
Life are accurate (as we cannot