n to feel
confident that he shall not disappoint any expectations raised by the
programme. Tragedies dripping with gore, comedies piled up with horrors,
tales of heads taken off in secret have been confided to him. If any
reader has not had enough of the ghastly tales served up to the public
for some time past, he has only to express his wish; the author is in
a position to reveal cold-blooded atrocities and family secrets of a
gloomy and astonishing nature. But in preference he has chosen those
pleasanter stories in which stormy passions are succeeded by purer
scenes, where the beauty and goodness of woman shine out the brighter
for the darkness. And, to the honor of the Thirteen, such episodes as
these are not wanting. Some day perhaps it may be thought worth while
to give their whole history to the world; in which case it might form a
pendant to the history of the buccaneers--that race apart so curiously
energetic, so attractive in spite of their crimes.

When a writer has a true story to tell, he should scorn to turn it into
a sort of puzzle toy, after the manner of those novelists who take
their reader for a walk through one cavern after another to show him a
dried-up corpse at the end of the fourth volume, and inform him, by way
of conclusion, that he has been frightened all along by a door hidden
somewhere or other behind some tapestry; or a dead body, left by
inadvertence, under the floor. So the present chronicler, in spite of
his objection to prefaces, felt bound to introduce his fragment by a few
remarks.

_Ferragus_, the first episode, is connected by invisible links with the
history of the Thirteen, for the power which they acquired in a natural
manner provides the apparently supernatural machinery.

Again, although a certain literary coquetry may be permissible to
retailers of the marvelous, the sober chronicler is bound to forego
such advantage as he may reap from an odd-sounding name, on which many
ephemeral successes are founded in these days. Wherefore the present
writer gives the following succinct statement of the reasons which
induced him to adopt the unlikely sounding title and sub-title.

In accordance with old-established custom, _Ferragus_ is a name taken by
the head of a guild of _Devorants_, _id est Devoirants_ or journeymen.
Every chief on the day of his election chooses a pseudonym and continues
a dynasty of _Devorants_ precisely as a pope changes his name on his
accession to the triple