Page:The Wreck of a World - Grove - 1890.djvu/14

 it may be for reasons of old friendship and the memory of former days, than for any which would commend themselves to my deliberate judgment. At the same time I have taken care to dissociate myself by means of these few words from any responsibility beyond that of translator and editor; which functions I have however exercised with an unsparing hand. Literally rendered Pedro's book would have seemed simply ridiculous in our mother tongue, and I have therefore, done my best to give an English or Anglo-American turn to the whole work. Into the mysteries of the great American language I have scarcely ventured to penetrate.

To the hands of the public I accordingly commit this fantastic work, only observing that if I do not brand it in so many words as a tissue of impossibilities, it is because my experience has made me slow to draw impassible lines between the possible and impossible or to say to the ocean of actual and potential fact, "So far shalt thou go, and no farther: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed."