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To those who associate the name of Henry James with all that is tedious and involved in the art of fiction, the tales in this volume, now collected for the first time, will appear as revelations of simplicity in style. Here we have the author in all his freshness; his principal litarary characteristics are ease and precision. For he had not yet forged rules for abstruseness of style, to perplex and weary his reader. In these stories James showed even no remotest sign of ever becoming a by-word for convolutions of English and a mark for the parodist.

Though the author collected in his Passionate Pilgrim (1875) a half a dozen of the tales he published in the magazines before his thirty-second year, he overlooked stories which were at least equal to, and in some cases superior to those he then brought together. The seven stories in this volume were written and published exactly at the time of the tales in his Passionate Pilgrim (between 1868 and 1874). The issuing of this volume, therefore, is like giving the public a new book by Henry James of the early period. The intellectual and the average man both may read and enjoy it.

It is the tendency of some critics to deprecate what an author has not collected himself. We know that writers often have been the poorest judges of their own work. We are all familiar with the story of Byron who preferred his vii