Excerpt from Country Living and Country Thinking This is a preface, Public, and you will read ily see that I cannot talk as freely as I should like, because it will never do to put you in an ill-humor at the beginning but you must know, yourself, that you are very much given to ille gal gossip. You have a cacoez'kes printendz'. The moment you get hold, by fair means or foul, of the outermost fibre of the shred of the husk of the semblance of a fact, you go straightway and put it in the newspapers. You are not so much to blame. Your fathers did it before you, and I don't suppose you were ever told that it was ill-bred; but it is. Please not do it again. Be very sure to know whether the name on the title-page is a pen-name or a baptismal name. If it is the former, confine your remarks to the book and its relations; if it is the lat ter you cannot do better than follow the same course. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.