Author’s Note

One word about the dialect in this book. It will be noticed that sometimes ‘you’ is spelt y’ u, and sometimes you; that in the same paragraph ‘going’ will sometimes be spelt gain’, sometimes gwine, sometimes going; and the reader will probably not fail to observe that the same speaker will indifferently say doan’t and don’t, the and de, that and dat, and so on.

That is how the people of the class dealt with in this story habitually speak. Many of them could, if they liked, talk with hardly a suggestion of dialect: I am alluding, of course, to the people of the city and towns. Rude dialect, hardly intelligible to the stranger and scarcely to be rendered by the written word, is still. spoken in some of the country districts of the island.