Excerpt from Everyman's Lbrary: Fiction The language used in telling the following story is not (as I hope the reader will soon perceive) the Author's, but Mr. William Marston's. The Author's intention was, while telling the story, to develop, in the person of an imaginary narrator, the character of a thoroughly good-hearted and tolerably clever man, who has his fingers (as he would say him self) in every one's pie, and who, for the life of him, cannot keep his own counsel - that is to say, the only person who, by any possibility, could have collected the mass of family gossip which makes up this tale. Had the Author told it in his own person, it would have been told with less familiarity, and, as he thinks. 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.