AUTHOR'S NOTE

THESE stories long ago crept like living creatures into my mind, and the recording of them was my first effort to write. I had kept them by me, hoping sometime to be able to improve them, but I find with sorrow I have passed too far away from the mystical mood in which they were written, and they must remain as they are. I have printed them less from my own desire than at the desire of some friends who remember the spiritual adventures we had when we were boys, and who wished for some memorial of them; so to them I dedicate the stories I have selected which seem to me to have most in them of the old life.

A.E.