CHAPTER XVI.
AESOP SMITH.
"AEsop Smith's Rides and Reveries" is one of the books which, really written by me from beginning to end, is nominally only edited.

It is a volume of self-experiences, to be read "through the lines,"-- and almost every incident and character therein is drawn from living models and actual facts.

It grew naturally out of the simple circumstance that I used daily to ride out alone on one of my horses--more exactly, mares--Minna and Brenda, and jotted down my cantering fancies in prose or verse when I got home.

Hurst & Blackett were its publishers in 1858,--and it soon was all sold off, but did not come to a second edition in London, though reproduced widely in New York and Philadelphia.

The fact is that, between an independent publisher who sells a little over cost price, and a Gargantua purchaser of thousands at a time, like Smith or Mudie, the poor author is sacrificed: he has received his fee for the edition (I got L100 for this first and only) and forthwith finds himself dismissed, while the reading public is made glad by easy perusal instead of costly purchase: and thus he is cheated of his second edition.