A NOTE
Which you, fair, friendly, discriminating reader (as the case may be), will please regard as properly folded, unsealed (having in mind the courteous delivery by the publisher), and running somewhat in this wise:
Begging your pardon for passing between you and the text proper, this is to say that if anything I have reported or confessed offends your sense of propriety, you are to read the offending passage a second time, whereupon you surely will discover evidences of an authorial humility incompatible with real irreverence. And if this apology sounds trite and lame, bear in mind that prefaces are written last, when a man (as when he has just parted from one of you) is completely quelled by a thought of the good things he might, or at least should, have said.
As for the pictorial obligato, if it shall occasionally show a curious indifference to the tune of the text, I trust that it may appear upon consideration that there are some very good reasons why this partnership should be as indefinite as it is.
And since you, reader, will in so many instances find yourself looking at your counterfeit presentment, I may, I hope, be allowed in this place to say this word of grateful acknowledgment to all of those daughters of the States who have permitted my camera to save my pen the impossible task of describing the beauty of the American girl.
A. B.