The Ship of Stars

(1899)

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To THE RIGHT HON. LEONARD HENRY COURTNEY, M.P.

My Dear Mr. Courtney,

It is with a peculiar pleasure and, I dare to hope, with some
appropriateness that I dedicate to you this story of the West
Country, which claims you with pride. To be sure, the places here
written of will be found in no map of your own or any neighbouring
constituency. A visitor may discover Nannizabuloe, but only to
wonder what has become of the lighthouse, or seek along the
sand-hills without hitting on Tredinnis. Yet much of the tale is
true in a fashion, even to fact. One or two things which happen to
Sir Harry Vyell did actually happen to a better man, who lived and
hunted foxes not a hundred miles from the "model borough" of
Liskeard, and are told of him in my friend Mr. W. F. Collier's memoir
of Harry Terrell, a bygone Dartmoor hero: and a true account of what
followed the wreck of the Samaritan will be found in a chapter of
Remembrances by that true poet and large-hearted man, Robert Stephen
Hawker.

But a novel ought to be true to more than fact: and if this one come
near its aim, no one will need to be told why I dedicate it to you.
If it do not (and I wish the chance could be despised!), its author
will yet hold that among the names of living Englishmen he could have
chosen none fitter to be inscribed above a story which in the telling
has insensibly come to rest upon the two texts, "Lord, make men as
towers!" and "All towers carry a light." Although for you Heaven has
seen fit to darken the light, believe me it shines outwards over the
waters and is a help to men: a guiding light tended by brave hands.
We pray, sir--we who sail in little boats--for long life to the tower
and the unfaltering lamp.

A. T. Q. C.

St. John's Eve, 1899.

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