Excerpt from Round the Corner: Being the Life and Death of Francis Christopher Folyat, Bachelor of Divinity, and Father of a Large Family

Being of such a strange temper and vision that when I aim my pen at a man I am as likely as not to hit his grandfather, I have in this instance endeavoured to forestall the treachery of my faculties and to go straight for the grandfather, though my interest is centred in the man. In a sense I have written his life as it was long before he was born, when he was nothing more than a growing presentiment. I have found it instructive and entertaining to observe and follow the evolution of the material, moral, and intellectual atmosphere which was to bear on him first of all through his mother's mind, and then through his own senses as soon as his life was separated from hers.

I launch my hero upon the world and leave it to anybody who likes to kill him, and I pray that those who are in process of morally slaughter ing their own innocents may take my imaginary child instead, for there is no remedy for the murder of a living soul, but, should it ever happen that my bantling demanded the right to continue his existence and in his turn to become a father, I have only to revive him, give him another name, and let him do his worst.

My conscience has been greatly exercised for some time now over the many errors and literary sins I have committed in the past - sins not against the rules (there are none) but against the persons whom I have forced to live in a mutilated, limited sort of life in the printed page, and those other excellent persons whom I have invited to colla borate in the fun of watching them. Upon these two sets of persons I have too often forced my beliefs without making it clear to them what my beliefs are. And here again I shall often seem to oflend, because, honestly, I can neither codify my beliefs nor force them into any existing code. I can, however, give a hint at them by saying that, in my view, we can only accept life with dignity and without injury to our self respect in perfect freedom - by which I shall be taken to mean Licence. Freedom is a much-abused word, and when you use it to seven men and women out of ten they at once think of a world full of satyrs. When I use the word Freedom, I think of a world full of what Walt Whitman.

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