Why a dedication? Why a preface—a foreword? Why any comment, save the title and the price mark?

Simplicity itself! The preface, foreword, dedication—what you may term it—gives opportunity to apologize for the liberality with which the author betrays his egotism, in the thickly sprinkled perpendicular pronoun.

And yet this plain young tale of plain things could not be told in the third person, since it is a mere setting down of real experience, painfully truthful and laboriously pruned where imagination was tempted to stray into fields of fiction. There is but one confession of romantic mendacity—and it shall not be made, for it might have happened! Quien Sabe?

And now this little story is dedicated to all who have bought or intend to buy homes, who have lost or expect to lose them; to the bird of passage and to the homing, and to all who love their fellowmen—but very especially to you who read it.

H. E. W.