"Bobby and the Key-hole" appeared eight or nine years ago in
_St. Nicholas_, and has never before been printed in book form. The
others were written earlier for juvenile periodicals of wide repute in
their time--periodicals that have now gone the way of almost all young
people's magazines, to the land of forgetfulness. Although I recall with
pleasure the fact that these little tales enjoyed a considerable
popularity when they first appeared, I might just as well as not have
called them "The Unlucky Stories." In two or three forms some of the
stories that form this collection have appeared in book covers in years
past, but always to meet with disaster that was no fault of theirs. Two
little books that contained a part of the stories herein reprinted were
burned up--plates, cuts and all--in the Chicago fire of 1871. Another
book, with some of these stories in it, was issued by a publisher in
Boston, who almost immediately failed, leaving the plates in pawn. These
fell into the hands of a man who issued a surreptitious edition, and then
into the possession of another, to whom at length I was forced to pay a
round sum for the plates, in order to extricate my unfortunate tales from
the hands of freebooters.
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