[Illustration]
Greenmantle
by John Buchan
Contents
1. A Mission is Proposed 2. The Gathering of the Missionaries 3. Peter Pienaar 4. Adventures of Two Dutchmen on the Loose 5. Further Adventures of the Same 6. The Indiscretions of the Same 7. Christmastide 8. The Essen Barges 9. The Return of the Straggler 10. The Garden-House of Suliman the Red 11. The Companions of the Rosy Hours 12. Four Missionaries See Light in Their Mission 13. I Move in Good Society 14. The Lady of the Mantilla 15. An Embarrassed Toilet 16. The Battered Caravanserai 17. Trouble By the Waters of Babylon 18. Sparrows on the Housetops 19. Greenmantle 20. Peter Pienaar Goes to the Wars 21. The Little Hill 22. The Guns of the North
To Caroline Grosvenor
During the past year, in the intervals of an active life, I have amused myself with constructing this tale. It has been scribbled in every kind of odd place and moment—in England and abroad, during long journeys, in half-hours between graver tasks; and it bears, I fear, the mark of its gipsy begetting. But it has amused me to write, and I shall be well repaid if it amuses you—and a few others—to read.
Let no man or woman call its events improbable. The war has driven that word from our vocabulary, and melodrama has become the prosiest realism. Things unimagined before happen daily to our friends by sea and land. The one chance in a thousand is habitually taken, and as often as not succeeds. Coincidence, like some new Briareus, stretches a hundred long arms hourly across the earth. Some day, when the full history is written—sober history with ample documents—the poor romancer will give up business and fall to reading Miss Austen in a hermitage.