"gp08w10" - читать интересную книгу автора (Parker Gilbert)

appeared several of those which came between the covers of A Romany of
the Snows were passing through the pages of magazines in England and
America. All of the thirty-nine stories might have appeared in one
volume under the title of Pierre and His People, but they were published
in two volumes with different titles in England, and in three volumes in
America, simply because there was enough material for the two and the
three volumes. In America The Adventurer of the North was broken up into
two volumes at the urgent request of my then publishers, Messrs. Stone &
Kimball, who had the gift of producing beautiful books, but perhaps had
not the same gift of business. These two American volumes succeeding
Pierre were published under the title of An Adventurer of the North and A
Romany of the Snows respectively. Now, the latter title, A Romany of the
Snows, was that which I originally chose for the volume published in
England as An Adventurer of the North. I was persuaded to reject the
title, A Romany of the Snows, by my English publisher, and I have never
forgiven myself since for being so weak. If a publisher had the
infallible instinct for these things he would not be a publisher--
he would be an author; and though an author may make mistakes like
everybody else, the average of his hits will be far higher than the
average of his misses in such things. The title, An Adventurer of the
North, is to my mind cumbrous and rough, and difficult in the mouth.
Compare it with some of the stories within the volume itself: for
instance, The Going of the White Swan, A Lovely Bully, At Bamber's Boom,
At Point o' Bugles, The Pilot of Belle Amour, The Spoil of the Puma, A
Romany of the Snows, and The Finding of Fingall. There it was, however;
I made the mistake and it sticks; but the book now will be published in
this subscription edition under the title first chosen by me, A Romany of
the Snows. It really does express what Pierre was.

Perhaps some of the stories in A Romany of the Snows have not the
sentimental simplicity of some of the earlier stories in Pierre and His
People, which take hold where a deeper and better work might not seize
the general public; but, reading these later stories after twenty years,
I feel that I was moving on steadily to a larger, firmer command of my
material, and was getting at closer grips with intimate human things.
There is some proof of what I say in the fact that one of the stories in
A Romany of the Snows, called The Going of the White Swan, appropriately
enough published originally in Scribner's Magazine, has had an
extraordinary popularity. It has been included in the programmes of
reciters from the Murrumbidgee to the Vaal, from John O'Groat's to Land's
End, and is now being published as a separate volume in England and
America. It has been dramatised several times, and is more alive to-day
than it was when it was published nearly twenty years ago. Almost the
same may be said of The Three Commandments in the Vulgar Tongue.

It has been said that, apart from the colour, form, and setting, the
incidents of these Pierre stories might have occurred anywhere. That
is true beyond a doubt, and it exactly represents my attitude of mind.
Every human passion, every incident springing out of a human passion
to-day, had its counterpart in the time of Amenhotep. The only