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PREFACE TO VOLUME I
tions that were written for magazines, and there is hardly anything more to be said for them. "The Wonderful Visit" was published as a book very soon after "The Time Machine," and it develops the method of quite a number of the writer's short stories, the method of bringing some fantastically possible or impossible thing into a commonplace group of people, and working out their reactions with the completest gravity and reasonableness. Perhaps the best and reallest of all this group of stories is the one called "The Purple Pileus," which completes this first volume.
H. G. W.
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