Excerpt from Rides and Reveries of the Late Mr. AEsop Smith First, you will wish to know why I was christened Alsop. There is an obvious answer: I was born Smith. I come of a family that has exhausted inge unity in providing its innumerable scions with dis tinctive pre-names that has worried its patronymic with every possible spelling - even unto Smijth, where the mysterious reduplication of the i, however zoologically orthodox, totally paralyses the power of pronunciation - of a family that, in utter despair of being discriminated any otherwise, has resolved at length to regard the prefix as everything, and the surname as nothing. That is one reason why I was christened aesop. 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.