I can not foretell it, for I am no prophet.

But let us not hope to change the Fates by our prefatory bowing and scraping.
-- I was forced to confess to my friend who was so kind as to offer to lend me this preface, that there was much truth in it and that truth is nowhere more rare than in prefaces, but it was not possible to adopt it for two reasons: one, that my proof-reader can not abide so many capitals, maintaining that they disfigure the page, and what is a preface of the high philosophical sort worth without a profusion of capitals?
Even Carlyle's columns would lose their greatest ornament if their capitals were gone.

The second reason for declining to use this preface was that my publishers are not philosophers and would never be content with an "Elect Few," and for my own part the pecuniary interest I have in the copyright renders it quite desirable that as many as possible should be elected to like it, or at least to buy it.
After all it seems a pity that I can not bring myself to use a straightforward APOLOGETIC AND EXPLANATORY PREFACE.
In view of the favor bestowed upon the author's previous story, both by the Public who Criticise and the Public who Buy, it seems a little ungracious to present so soon, another, the scene of which is also laid in the valley of the Ohio.

But the picture of Western country life in "The Hoosier School-Master" would not have been complete without this companion-piece, which presents a different phase of it.

And indeed there is no provincial life richer in material if only one knew how to get at it.
Nothing is more reverent than a wholesome hatred of hypocrisy.