Thirteen Stories

This eBook was transcribed by Les Bowler
By R. B. Cunninghame Graham
Author of “Mogreb-El-Acksa,” etc.
London William Heinemann 1900
All rights , including translation , reserved
To
George Morton Mansel
I Dedicate these sketches , stories , studies , or what do you call them . We have galloped together over many leagues of Pampa , by day and night , and therefore I hope he will find the tales ( or what do you call them ) as near square by the lifts and braces , as is to be expected from a mere landsman .
Acknowledgments are due to :
The “ Saturday Review ,” the “ Westminster Gazette ,” and “ Justice ,” in which papers several of the Sketches included in this volume have appeared .
To-day in warfare all the niceties of old-world tactics are fallen into contempt. No word of outworks, ravelins, of mamelons, of counter-scarps, of glacis, fascines; none of the terms by means of which Vauban obscured his art, are even mentioned. Armies fall to and blow such brains as they may have out of each other’s heads without so much as a salute. And so of literature, your “few first words,” your “avant-propos,” your nice approaches to the reader, giving him beforehand some taste of what is to follow, have also fallen into disuse. The man of genius (and in no age has self-dubbed genius called out so loud in every street, and been accepted at its own appraisement) stuffs you his epoch-making book full of the technicalities of some obscure or half-forgotten trade, and rattles on at once, sans introduction, twenty knots an hour, like a torpedo boat. No preface, dedication, not even an apology pro existentiâ ejus intervening betwixt the bewildered public and the full power of his wit. A graceless way of doing things, and not comparable to the slow approach by “prefatory words,” “censura,” “dedication,” by means of which the writers of the past had half disarmed the critic ere he had read a line. I like to fancy to myself the progress of a fight in days gone by, with marching, countermarching, manoeuvring, so to speak, for the weather-gauge, and then the general engagement all by the book of arithmetic, and squadrons going down like men upon a chessboard after nice calculation, and like gentlemen.