Not having even been asked to do so, I write this preface from admiration of the book. The translation I have not yet seen, but knowing previous work by the same hand, have confidence in it. How much the story is founded on fact I cannot tell; a substratum of fact there must be. To know that such a man once lived as is represented in it, might well wake a new feeling of both strength and obligation: here is one who, with absolutely no help from what is commonly meant by education, lived heroically. But be the tale as much a product of the imagination as the wildest romance, it remains a significant fact that the generation has produced a man capable of such an ideal.