Excerpt from Jinny the Carrier You and Audrey have so often proclaimed the need - in' our world of sorrow and care - of a bland novel, defining it as one to be read when in bed with a sore throat, that as an adventurer in letters I have frequently felt tempted to write one for you. But the Spirit bloweth where it listeth, and seemed perversely' to have turned against novels altogether, perhaps because I had been labelled novelist, as though one had set up a factory. (two a year is, I believe, the correct output.) However, here is a novel at last - my first this century - and there is a further reason for presuming to associate you with it, because it is largely from the vantage-point of your Essex homestead that I have, during the past twenty years, absorbed the landscape, character, and dialect which finally insisted on finding expression, first in a little play, and now in this elaborate canvas. How often have I passed over High Field and seen the Opulent valley - tilth and pasture and ancient country seats - stretching before me like a great poem, with its glint of winding water, and the exquisite blue of its distances, and Bassetts awaiting me below, snuggling under its mellow moss-stained tiles, a true English home of plain living and high thinking, and latterly of the rural Muse! I can only hope that some breath of the in spiration which has emanated from Bassetts in these latter. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.