These nine stories could not be called popular, and they were the only stories I have ever written which did not have an immediate welcome from the editors to whom they were sent.

In the United States I offered them to 'Harper's Magazine', but the editor, Henry M.Alden, while, as I know, caring for them personally, still hesitated to publish them.

He thought them too symbolic for the every-day reader.

He had been offered four of them at once because I declined to dispose of them separately, though the editor of another magazine was willing to publish two of them.
Messrs.

Stone & Kimball, however, who had plenty of fearlessness where literature was concerned, immediately bought the series for The Chap Book, long since dead, and they were published in that wonderful little short-lived magazine, which contained some things of permanent value to literature.