hanged it to Robert Moray. 'The Seats of the
Mighty' goes on, I am happy to say, with an ever-increasing number
of friends. It has a position perhaps not wholly deserved, but it has
crystallised some elements in the life of the continent of America, the
history of France and England, and of the British Empire which may serve
here and there to inspire the love of things done for the sake of a
nation rather than for the welfare of an individual.

I began this introduction by saying that the book was started in
the summer of 1894. That was at a little place called Mablethorpe in
Lincolnshire, on the east coast of England. For several months I worked
in absolute seclusion in that out-of-the-way spot which had not then
become a Mecca for trippers, and on the wonderful sands, stretching for
miles upon miles coastwise and here and there as much as a mile out
to the sea, I tried to live over again the days of Wolfe and Montcalm.
Appropriately enough the book was begun in a hotel at Mablethorpe called
"The Book in Hand." The name was got, I believe, from the fact that, in
a far-off day, a ship was wrecked upon the coast at Mablethorpe, and the
only person saved was the captain, who came ashore with a Bible in his
hands. During the writing now and again a friend would come to me from
London or elsewhere, and there would be a day off, full of literary
tattle, but immediately my friends were gone I was lost again in the
atmosphere of the middle of the eighteenth century.

I stayed at Mablethorpe until the late autumn, and then I went to
Harrogate, exchanging the sea for the moors, and there, still living the
open-air life, I remained for several months until I had finished the
book. The writing of it knew no interruption and was happily set. It
was a thing apart, and not a single untoward invasion of other interests
affected its course.

The title of the book was for long a trouble to me. Months went by
before I could find what I wanted. Scores of titles occurred to me,
but each was rejected. At last, one day when I was being visited by
Mr. Grant Richards, since then a London publisher, but at that time a
writer, who had come to interview me for 'Great Thoughts', I told him of
my difficulties regarding the title. I was saying that I felt the title
should be, as it were, the kernel of a book. I said: "You see, it is a
struggle of one simple girl against principalities and powers; it is the
final conquest of the good over the great