Book Description

�AT last, after so many years, I have the pleasure of re-introducing you to `Prince Otto,' whom you will remember a very little fellow, no bigger in fact than a few sheets of memoranda written for me by your kind hand. The sight of his name will carry you back to an old wooden house embowered in creepers; a house that was far gone in the respectable stages of antiquity and seemed indissoluble from the green garden in which it stood, and that yet was a sea-traveller in its younger days, and had come round the Horn piecemeal in the belly of a ship, and might have heard the seamen stamping and shouting and the note of the boatswain's whistle. It will recall to you the nondescript inhabitants now so widely scattered:-- the two horses, the dog, and the four cats, some of them still looking in your face as you read these lines;-- the poor lady, so unfortunately married to an author;-- the China boy, by this time, perhaps, baiting his line by the banks of a river in the Flowery Land;-- and in particular the Scot who was then sick apparently unto death, and whom you did so much to cheer and keep in good behaviour. �