Faustula N.A.D. 340

No writer can guess before-hand whether his work will be approved or no; nor, while he is writing Jdoes he ever try to guess. He is taken up with the new children he is begetting between brain and pen, and has no room in his mind for conjecture as to how others may like or mislike them. If he suffered the manyheaded shadow of the public to come between them and him, even to himself they could never he real and living. But when his work is done, and these children of his are fiooed in all the reality that, for himself at least, is theirs, he must begin to hope that the love he has for them others may share with him, I hope you will like Faustula, not the mere story in which I have tried to set her forth, hut the human creature, the daughter of Faustulus, Her other father loves her as well as he loves Consuelo, better than he loves Marotz, To him it makes no difference that he chose she should be born more than fifteen hundred years ago. To him there is no archaic chill about her; all the centuries between are for him only a white bridge, far beneath which all the worlds change lies dwindled, ujon which she stands with a lonely cry for pity and sympathy.