Well, they were written mainly to please one woman who is now dead, but as I am writing a little book about my mother I shall say no more of her here.
Many of the chapters in "Auld Licht Idylls" first appeared in a different form in the _St.James's Gazette_, and there is little doubt that they would never have appeared anywhere but for the encouragement given to me by the editor of that paper.

It was pressure from him that induced me to write a second "Idyll" and a third after I thought the first completed the picture, he set me thinking seriously of these people, and though he knew nothing of them himself, may be said to have led me back to them.

It seems odd, and yet I am not the first nor the fiftieth who has left Thrums at sunrise to seek the life-work that was all the time awaiting him at home.

And we seldom sally forth a second time.

I had always meant to be a novelist, but London, I thought, was the quarry.
For long I had an uneasy feeling that no one save the editor read my contributions, for I was leading a lonely life in London, and not another editor could I find in the land willing to print the Scotch dialect.