I have never tried to girdle the earth; my limits are narrow; the modern novel, as Andrew Lang lately calls it,--with its love-making, disquisition, description, history, theology, ethics,--I have no sprinkling of.

My last novel, "Temple House," was personally conducted, so far that I went to Plymouth to find a suitable abode for my hero, Angus Gates, and to measure with my eye the distance between the bar in the bay and the shore, the scene of a famous wreck before the Revolution.

As my stories and novels were never in touch with my actual life, they seem now as if they were written by a ghost of their time.

It is to strangers from strange places that I owe the most sympathetic recognition.

Some have come to me, and from many I have had letters that warmed my heart, and cheered my mind.