Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/11

 PREFACE

OBODY, I am assured, ever reads a preface. I consider, therefore, that I may safely regard this foreword as a confidential document, written for the sole purpose of salving my own sensitive conscience. From this point of view I regard it as necessary, for it seems to me that the imposture involved in issuing as a work of fiction a volume which is in the main a record of fact, should be frankly confessed from the outset. A knowledge of the truth that these initial pages will remain to some extent a secret between me, the proofreader, and the printer, will enable me, however, to write of personal things with a larger measure of freedom than I should otherwise be bold enough to use.

The stories composing this book, with a single exception—"The Ghoul," which reached me at second hand—are all relations of incidents in which I have had a part, or in which the principal actors have been familiarly known to me. They faithfully reproduce conditions of life as they existed in the Malayan Peninsula before the white men took a hand in the government of the native states, or immediately after our coming—things as I knew them between 1883 and 1903—the twenty years that I passed in that most beautiful and at one time little frequented