E-text prepared by Gene Smethers
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team

MINCE PIE

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

TO

F.M. AND L.J.M.

INSTRUCTIONS

This book is intended to be read in bed. Please do not attempt to read itanywhere else.

In order to obtain the best results for all concerned do not read aborrowed copy, but buy one. If the bed is a double bed, buy two.

Do not lend a copy under any circumstances, but refer your friends to thenearest bookshop, where they may expiate their curiosity.

Most of these sketches were first printed in the Philadelphia EveningPublic Ledger; others appeared in The Bookman, the BostonEvening Transcript, Life, and The Smart Set. To allthese publications I am indebted for permission to reprint.

If one asks what excuse there can be for prolonging the existence of thesetrifles, my answer is that there is no excuse. But a copy on the bedsideshelf may possibly pave the way to easy slumber. Only a mind "debauched bylearning" (in Doctor Johnson's phrase) will scrutinize them too anxiously.

It seems to me, on reading the proofs, that the skit entitled "Trials of aPresident Travelling Abroad" is a faint and subconscious echo of a passage ina favorite of my early youth, Happy Thoughts, by the late F.C.Burnand. If this acknowledgment should move anyone to read that deliciousclassic of pleasantry, the innocent plunder may be pardonable.

And now a word of obeisance. I take this opportunity of thanking severalgentle overseers and magistrates who have been too generously friendly tothese eccentric gestures. These are Mr. Robert Cortes Holliday, editor ofThe Bookman and victim of the novelette herein entitled "Owd Bob"; Mr.Edwin F. Edgett, literary editor of The Boston Transcript, who hasoften permitted me to cut outrageous capers in his hospitable columns; andMr. Thomas L. Masson, of Life, who allows me to reprint several of theshorter pieces. But most of all I thank Mr. David E. Smiley, editor of thePhiladelphia Evening Public Ledger, for whom the majority of thesesketches were written, and whose patience and kindness have been a frequentamazement to

THE AUTHOR.

Philadelphia September, 1919

MINCE PIE

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