Excerpt from Marjorie Fleming: A Sketch Being the Paper Entitled "Pet Marjorie: A Story of Child-Life Fifty Years Ago" The separate publication of this sketch has been forced upon me by the 'somewhat free use' made of it in a second and thereby enlarged edition of the 'little book' to which I owe my introduction to Marjorie Fleming - but nothing more; - a 'use' so exceedingly 'free' as to extend almost to everything with which I had ventured perhaps to encumber the letters and journals of that dear child. To be called 'kind and genial' by the individual who devised this edition has, strange as he may think it, altogether failed to console me. Empty praises without the solid pudding is proverbially a thing of naught; but what shall we say of praise, the emptiness of which is aggravated, not merely by the absence, but by the actual abstraction of the pudding? This little act of conveyancing - this 'engaging compilation' as he would have called it - puts me in mind of that pleasant joke in the preface to Essays by Mr. Goldsmith? 'I would desire in this case, to imitate that fat man whom I have somewhere heard of in a shipwreck, who, when the sailors prest by famine, were taking slices from his body, to satisfy their hunger, insisted with great justice on having the first cut for himself.' I have to thank the proprietors of the North British Review for permitting this reprint. 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.