Project Gutenberg's The Fortunes Of Glencore, by Charles James Lever

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Title: The Fortunes Of Glencore

Author: Charles James Lever

Illustrator: E. J. Wheeler and W. Cubitt Cooke

Release Date: August 27, 2010 [EBook #33556]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FORTUNES OF GLENCORE ***

Produced by David Widger

THE FORTUNES OF GLENCORE

By Charles James Lever

With Illustrations By E. J. Wheeler and W. Cubitt Cooke

Boston: Little, Brown, And Company.

1902

PREFACE.

I am unwilling to suffer this tale to leave my hands without a word
of explanation to my reader. If I have never disguised from myself the
grounds of any humble success I have attained to as a writer of fiction;
if I have always had before me the fact that to movement and action,
the stir of incident, and a certain light-heartedness and gayety of
temperament, more easy to impart to others than to repress in one's
self, I have owed much, if not all, of whatever popularity I have
enjoyed, I have yet felt, or fancied that I felt, that it would be in
the delineation of very different scenes, and the portraiture of very
different emotions, that I should reap what I would reckon as a real
success. This conviction, or impression if you will, has become stronger
with years and with the knowledge of life; years have imparted, and time
has but confirmed me in, the notion that any skill I possess lies in the
detection of character, and the unravelment of that tangled skein which
makes up human motives.

I am well aware that no error is more common than to mistake one's own
powers; nor does anything more contribute to this error than a sense of
self-depreciation for what the world has been pleased to deem successful
in us. To test my conviction, or to abandon it as a delusion forever, I
have written the present story of "Glencore."

I make but little pretension to the claim of interesting; as little do
I aspire to the higher credit of instructing. All I have attempted-all I
have striven to accomplish-is the faithful portraiture of character,
the close analysis of motives, and correct observation as to some of the
mann