DEDICATION

Why a dedication? Why a preface--a foreword? Why any comment, save the

title and the price mark?

Simplicity itself! The preface, foreword, dedication--what you may term

it--gives opportunity to apologize for the liberality with which the

author betrays his egotism, in the thickly sprinkled perpendicular

pronoun.

And yet this plain young tale of plain things could not be told in the

third person, since it is a mere setting down of real experience,

painfully truthful and laboriously pruned where imagination was tempted

to stray into fields of fiction. There is but one confession of romantic

mendacity--and it shall not be made, for it _might_ have happened! Quien

Sabe?

And now this little story is dedicated to all who have bought or intend

to buy homes, who have lost or expect to lose them; to the bird of

passage and to the homing, and to all who love their fellowmen--but very

especially to you who read it.