A SHEAF

This volume is but a garnering of non-creative writings; mostly pleas of some sort or other—wild oats of a novelist, which he has been asked to bind up. He cannot say that he had any wanton pleasure in sowing any of them; and lest there be others of the same opinion as the anonymous gentleman who thus joyously addressed him last July: “But there—I suppose you are getting a bit out of it. Men of your calibre will do anything for filthy lucre—you old and cunning reptile!”—he mentions that he has not, personally, profited a penny by anything in this volume, and that the future proceeds therefrom will be given to St. Dunstan’s, and the National Institute for the Blind, London.