From that point, all the main events of the story are purposely foreshadowed before they take place -- my present design being to rouse the
reader's interest in following the train of circumstances by which these foreseen events are brought about.
My object in writing the following pages was not simply to amuse the Reader; neither was it to gratify my own taste, nor yet to ingratiate myself with the Press and the Public: I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.
But, at the same time, if any honest reader shall have derived more pain than pleasure from its perusal, and have closed the last volume with a disagreeable impression on his mind, I humbly crave his pardon, for such was far from my intention; and I will endeavour to do better another time, for I love to give innocent pleasure.
But as this work is chiefly recommended to those who know how to read it, and how to make the good uses of it which the story all along recommends to them, so it is to be hoped that such readers will be more leased with the moral than the fable, with the application than with the relation, and with the end of the writer than with the life of the person written of.
The world is so taken up of late with novels and romances, that it will be hard for a private history to be taken for genuine, where the names and other circumstances of the person are concealed, and on this account we must be content to leave the reader to pass his own opinion upon the ensuing sheet, and take it just as he pleases.
Princess Ozma, whom I love as much as my readers do, is again introduced in this story, and so are several of our old friends of Oz.
Many a time tears of pride and joy have stood in my eyes while I read the tender, loving, appealing letters that came to me in almost every mail from my little readers. To have pleased you, to have interested you, to have won your friendship, and perhaps your love, through my stories, is to my mind as great an achievement as to become President of the United States.
And each of those stories, to mean something, must justify itself in its own way to the conscience of each successive
reader.
"But come," I imagine some
reader complaining, "isn't it high time for something to happen?" No doubt it is, but what am I to do?
Nor do I fear that my sensible
reader, though most luxurious in his taste, will start, cavil, or be offended, because I have named but one article.
In several works descriptive of the islands in the Pacific, many of the most beautiful combinations of vocal sounds have been altogether lost to the ear of the
reader by an over-attention to the ordinary rules of spelling.
But when it is remembered that in Zarathustra we not only have the history of his most intimate experiences, friendships, feuds, disappointments, triumphs and the like, but that the very form in which they are narrated is one which tends rather to obscure than to throw light upon them, the difficulties which meet the
reader who starts quite unprepared will be seen to be really formidable.