Note by the Publisher
memory. (Her jottings made day by day throughout the voyage, four pages all told, served but to recall changes of weather and stages of progress.) The second is that same intense natural love of natural beauty which found its first public expression in The House Without Windows and Eepersip's Life There (1927). In The House Without Windows this passion clothed itself in fantasy which incorporated here and there some details of actual experience. In this record of an actual experience, it clothes itself in a shimmering veil of fantasy, so transparent that the actuality of the basic experience is rather heightened than obscured.
The voyage was taken three months after the author's thirteenth birthday. The book comes to publication a little before her fourteenth. It is, then, the spontaneous output of a very young writer who, as it happens, has never as yet had a day of formal schooling, and who learns her craft by that simplest of all processes, enjoying with abandon whatever comes into her life, reading with absorption whatever comes into her hands, and writing with demoniacal energy whatever comes into her head. To the publisher, it seems that this one exhibit justifies her
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