



Produced by Kevin Handy, Dave Maddock, Josephine Paolucci and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team.





PETER'S MOTHER

NEW EDITION

WITH INTRODUCTION

BY

MRS. HENRY DE LA PASTURE

1906

  _And I left my youth behind
  For somebody else to find_.


TO THE BELOVED MEMORY OF MY ONLY BROTHER

LT. COLONEL WALTER FLOYD BONHAM, D.S.O.




TO MY AMERICAN READERS

The author of "Peter's Mother" has been bidden of the publishers, who
have incurred the responsibility of presenting her to the American
public, to write a preface to this edition of her novel. She does so
with the more diffidence because it has been impressed upon her, by
more than one wiseacre, that her novels treat of a life too narrow,
an atmosphere too circumscribed, to be understood or appreciated by
American readers.

No one can please everybody; I suppose that no one, except the old man
in Aesop's Fable, ever tried to do so. But I venture to believe that
to some Americans, a sincere and truthful portrait of a typica