The writer of these apologues hopes that the Rev. Mr. Gowles will not be
regarded as his idea of a typical missionary. The countrymen of
Codrington and Callaway, of Patteson and Livingstone, know better what
missionaries may be, and often are. But the wrong sort as well as the
right sort exists everywhere, and Mr. Gowles is not a very gross
caricature of the ignorant teacher of heathendom. I am convinced that he
would have seen nothing but a set of darkened savages in the ancient
Greeks. The religious eccentricities of the Hellenes are not exaggerated
in "The End of Phaeacia;" nay, Mr. Gowles might have seen odder things in
Attica than he discovered, or chose to record, in Boothland.
To avoid the charge of plagiarism, perhaps it should be mentioned that
"The Romance of the First Radical" was written long before I read
Tanner's "Narrative of a Captivity among the Indians." Tanner, like Why-
Why, had trouble with the chief medicine-man of his community.
If my dear kinsman and companion of old days, J. J. A., reads "My Friend
the Beach-comber," he will recognize many of his own yarns, but the
portrait of the narrator is wholly fanciful.
"In Castle Perilous" and "A Cheap Nigger" are reprinted from the Cornhill
Magazine; "My Friend the Beach-comber," from Longman's; "The Great
Gladstone Myth," from Macmillan's; "In the Wrong Paradise," from the
Fortnightly Review; "A Duchess's Secret," from the Overland Mail; "The
Romance of the First Radical," from Fraser's Magazine; and "The End of
Phaeacia," from Time, by the courteous permission of the editors and
proprietors of those periodicals.