Excerpt from The World of Wonderful Reality It is now more than ten years ago that "The City of Beautiful Nonsense" was written, and much water has flowed under the bridges since then. Many times in the last six of those ten years I have been urged to write a sequel to that story. There was an inconclusiveness about its ending I was told, which, while it may have completed the color in its texture of romance, still left threads for raveling which I had not attempted to secure. Jill Dealtry in the emotion that came to her at the death-bed of Thomas Grey, had given her heart and her life to John. Love, there on the Venice lagoon, had made its conquest over expediency. She had put aside all thought of the marriage of convenience with her father's friend. In that atmosphere of Romance, love and all the glamour of life were triumphant. Perhaps that was the secret of the book's success with the public. It must be true of people in general that they love to dream a moment in a sleepless world - they need at times to get away from the insomnia of facts. I feel confident that the majority of people reading "The City of Beautiful Nonsense" had little desire when the book was finished to know how John Grey in his two rooms in Fetter Lane and living, as the poor do, by the grace of mercy of the pawn-shop was going to keep a wife. I am sure they did not worry their heads about it. 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.