_To you and the friends who have partaken in these
"Mystifications," I dedicate this little volume, trusting that,
after a silence of forty years, its echoes may awaken many
agreeable memorials of a society that has nearly passed away._
_I have been asked if I had no remorse in ridiculing
singularities of character, or practising deceptions;--certainly
not._
_There was no personal ridicule or mimicry of any living
creature, but merely the personation or type of a bygone class,
that had survived the fashion of its day._
_It was altogether a fanciful existence, developing itself
according to circumstances, or for the amusement of a select
party, among whom the announcement of a stranger lady, an
original, led to no suspicion of deception. No one ever took
offence: indeed it generally elicited the finest individual
traits of sympathy in the minds of the dupes, especially in the
case of Mr. Jeffrey, whose sweet-tempered kindly nature
manifested itself throughout the whole of the tiresome interview
with the law-loving Lady Pitlyal._
_No one enjoyed her eccentricities more than he did, or more
readily devised the arrangement of a similar scene for the
amusement of our mutual friends._
_The cleverest people were the easiest mystified, and when once
the deception took place, it mattered not how arrant the
nonsense or how exaggerated the costume. Indeed, children and
dogs were the only detectives._
_I often felt so identified with the character, so charmed with
the pleasure manifested by my audience, that it became painful
to lay aside the veil, and descend again into the humdrum
realities of my own self._
_These personations never lost me a friend; on the contrary,
they originated friendships that cease only with life._
_The Lady Pitlyal's course is run; she bequeaths to you these
reminiscences of beloved friends and pleasant meetings._
_And that the blessing of God may descend on "each and all of
you," is the fervent prayer of her kinswoman and executrix,_
_CLEMENTINA STIRLING GRAHAM._
I now beg to "convey," as Pistol delicately calls it, or as we on our
side the Border would say, to "lift," enough of this unique volume to
make my readers hunger for the whole.