In the Wrong Paradise

In the Wrong Paradise, by
Andrew Lang

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Title: In the Wrong Paradise
Author: Andrew Lang
Release Date: November 8, 2004 [eBook #13984]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE
WRONG PARADISE***

Transcribed from the 1886 Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. edition by David
Price, email ccx074@coventry

In the Wrong Paradise and Other Stories by Andrew Lang

Contents:
The End of Phaeacia In the Wrong Paradise A Cheap Nigger The
Romance of the First Radical A Duchess's Secret The House of Strange
Stories In Castle Perilous The Great Gladstone Myth My Friend the
Beach-Comber

DEDICATION.
DEAR RIDER HAGGARD,
I have asked you to let me put your name here, that I might have the
opportunity of saying how much pleasure I owe to your romances.
They make one a boy again while one is reading them; and the student
of "The Witch's Head" and of "King Solomon's Mines" is as young, in
heart, as when he hunted long ago with Chingachgook and Uncas. You,
who know the noble barbarian in his African retreats, appear to retain
more than most men of his fresh natural imagination. We are all
savages under our white skins; but you alone recall to us the delights
and terrors of the world's nonage. We are hunters again, trappers,
adventurers bold, while we study you, and the blithe barbarian wakens
even in the weary person of letters. He forgets proof-sheets and papers,
and the "young lion" seeks his food from God, in the fearless ancient
way, with bow or rifle. Of all modern heroes of romance, the dearest to
me is your faithful Zulu, and I own I cried when he bade farewell to his
English master, in "The Witch's Head."
In the following tales the natural man takes a hand, but he is seen
through civilized spectacles, not, as in your delightful books, with the
eyes of the sympathetic sportsman. If Why-Why and Mr. Gowles
amuse you a little, let this be my Diomedean exchange of bronze for
gold--of the new Phaeacia for Kukuana land, or for that haunted city of
Kor, in which your fair Ayesha dwells undying, as yet unknown to the
future lovers of She.
Very sincerely yours, A. LANG. CROMER, August 29, 1886.

PREFACE.
The writer of these apologues hopes that the Rev. Mr. Gowles will not
be regarded as his idea of a typical missionary. The countrymen of
Codrington and Callaway, of Patteson and Livingstone, know better
what missionaries may be, and often are. But the wrong sort as well as
the right sort exists everywhere, and Mr. Gowles is not a very gross
caricature of the ignorant teacher of heathendom. I am convinced that
he would have seen nothing but a set of darkened savages in the ancient
Greeks. The religious eccentricities of the Hellenes are not exaggerated
in "The End of Phaeacia;" nay, Mr. Gowles might have seen odder
things in Attica than he discovered, or chose to record, in Boothland.
To avoid the charge of plagiarism, perhaps it should be mentioned that
"The Romance of the First Radical" was written long before I read
Tanner's "Narrative of a Captivity among the Indians." Tanner, like
Why- Why, had trouble with the chief medicine-man of his community.
If my dear kinsman and companion of old days, J. J. A., reads "My
Friend the Beach-comber," he will recognize many of his own yarns,
but the portrait of the narrator is wholly fanciful.
"In Castle Perilous" and "A Cheap Nigger" are reprinted from the
Cornhill Magazine; "My Friend the Beach-comber," from Longman's;
"The Great Gladstone Myth," from Macmillan's; "In the Wrong
Paradise," from the Fortnightly Review; "A Duchess's Secret," from the
Overland Mail; "The Romance of the First Radical," from Fraser's
Magazine; and "The End of Phaeacia," from Time, by the courteous
permission of the editors and proprietors of those periodicals.

THE END OF PHAEACIA
I. INTRODUCTORY. {1}
The Rev. Thomas Gowles, well known in Colonial circles where the

Truth is valued, as "the Boanerges of the Pacific," departed this life at
Hackney Wick, on the 6th of March, 1885. The Laodiceans in our
midst have ventured to affirm that the world at large has been a more
restful place since Mr. Gowles was taken from his corner of the
vineyard. The Boanerges of the Pacific was, indeed, one of those
rarely-gifted souls, souls like a Luther or a Knox, who can tolerate no
contradiction, and will