Observe the prints of my goloshes on the steep ascent, and take courage. And if you are perturbed, as I have been perturbed, let me whisper to you the exhortation of the bankrupt to the terrestrial globe:
Never you mind. Roll on.
When I first took a pen into my youthful hand, I lived in a very secluded part of the Midlands, and perhaps, my little world being what it was, it was inevitable that the originals of my characters, especially the tiresome ones, should be immediately identified with the kindly neighbours within a five-mile radius of my paternal Rectory. Five miles was about the utmost our little pony could do. It was therefore obviously impossible that I could be acquainted with any one beyond that distance. And from first to last, from that day to this, no one leading a secluded life has been so fatuous as to believe that my characters were evolved out of my inner consciousness. "After all, you must own you took them from some one," is a phrase which has long lost its novelty for me. I remember even now my shocked astonishment when a furious neighbour walked up to me and said, "We all recognised Mrs. Alwynn at once as Mrs. ——, and we all say it is not in the least like her."
It was not, indeed. There was no shadow of resemblance. Did Mrs. ——, who had been so kind to me from a child, ever hear that report, I wonder? It gave me many a miserable hour, just when I was expanding in the sunshine of my first favourable reviews.
When I was still quite a beginner, Mrs. Clifford published her beautiful and touching book, "Aunt Anne."
There was, I am willing to believe—it is my duty to believe something—a faint resemblance between her "Aunt Anne" and an old great-aunt of mine, "Aunt Anna Maria," long since dead, whom I had only seen once or twice when I was a small child.
The fact that I could not have known my departed relation did not prevent two of my cousins, elderly maiden ladies who had had that privilege, from writing to me in great indignation at my having ventured to travesty my old aunt. They had found me out (I am always being found out), and the vials of their wrath were poured out over me.
In my whilom ignorance, in my lamblike innocence of the darker side of human nature, I actually thought that a disclaimer would settle the matter.
When has a disclaimer ever been of any use? When has it ever achieved anything except to add untruthfulness to my other crimes? Why have I ever written one, after that first disastrous essay, in which I civilly pointed out that not I, but Mrs. Clifford, the well-known writer, was the author of "Aunt Anne?"
They replied at once to say that this was untrue, because I, and I alone, could have written it.