ABSTRACT
… When the sad news was made public it fell with the shock of a personal loss on the hearts of countless millions, to whom the name of the famous author was like that of an intimate and dear friend. For five-and-thirty years his keen observation and his exuberant and vivacious fancy had issued in an incessant bright stream of story-telling—a series of books readable beyond rivalry, describing his own time to itself in a new and striking style; heightening the familiar so as to give it an artistic impressiveness, enriching it with humour, softening it with sympathies, mingling shrewd sense with a fanciful picturesqueness so as to produce the most unexpected effects out of commonplace materials, and discovering many quaint and strange things lurking in the midst of everyday life.
