DEAR BOB: It is quite a long time now since you and I first caught
sight of each other and became fellow wayfarers on this Vanishing Road
of the world. O quite a lot of years now, Bob! Yet I control my tendency
to shiver at their number from the fact that we have travelled them,
always within hailing distance of each other, I with the comfortable
knowledge that near by I had so good a comrade, so true a friend.
For this once, by your leave, we won't "can" the sentiment,--to use an
idiom in which you are the master-artist on this continent,--but I, at
least, will luxuriate in retrospect, as I write your name by way of
dedication to this volume of essays, for some of which your quick-firing
mind is somewhat more than editorially responsible. You were one of the
first to make me welcome to a country of which, even as a boy, I used
prophetically to dream as my "promised land," little knowing that it was
indeed to be my home, the home of my spirit, as well as the final
resting-place of my household gods; and, having you so early for my
friend, is it to be wondered at if I soon came to regard the American
humourist as the noblest work of God?
There is yet, I trust, much left of the Vanishing Road for us to travel
together; and I hope that, when the time comes for us both to vanish
over the horizon line, we may exit still within hail of each other,--so
that we may have a reasonable chance of hitting the trail together on
the next route, whatever it is going to be.
Always yours,
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE.
Rowayton, December 25, 1914.
For their discernment in giving the following essays their first
opportunity with the reader the writer desires to thank the editors of
_The North American Review_, _Harper's Magazine_, _The Century_, _The
Smart Set_, _Munsey's_, _The Out-Door World_, and _The Forum_.