Note: Written for the Dell Yearling Classics edition by the writer's son Christopher Lofting, (c) 1986 and evidently composed in 1986. (The first ed. Treasury includes a Foreword by the publisher, Lippincott.) Lofting mentions charges in the late 1960s that certain passages and illustrations were racist, and mentions the 1986 return of Halley's Comet. -- based on communication with the verifier of those two eds.