Some people bring home a bundle of sketches from their summer
holiday--water-colour memories of cliff, of sea, ruined castle, and
ancient abbey. I brought back from the Channel Islands these pages here
printed, as a kind of bundle of sketches in black and white, put
together day by day as a holiday-task, and forming a string, as it were,
on which the memories of ramble after ramble were threaded,--rambles
from end to end of Guernsey, and rambles, too, among the treasures of
the Guille-Allés Library. I enjoyed my holiday all the better, as I
peopled the cliffs and glens with the shadows of eight hundred years
ago, and I hope that others may find some reality and some pleasure in
the result as it is given here.

If any inquire into the real historical foundations for the story, I
refer them to the few notes at the end of the book, which will reveal
without much doubt where fiction begins and fact ends. I hope I may be
allowed a little license in the treatment of facts. There is--is there
not?--a logic of fiction, as well as a logic of facts. At least there
seemed to be as I wrote the story, and I hope no one who reads it will
be inclined to quarrel with any part of it because its only basis
is--imagination. Anyway, I will shelter myself under the great words of
a great man, in the preface of one of the great books of the world: "For
herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness,
hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin.
Do after the good and leave the evil, and it shall bring you to good
fame and _renommée_. And for to pass the time this book shall be
pleasant to read in, but for to give faith and belief that all is true
that is contained herein, ye be at your liberty: but all is written for
our doctrine, and for to beware that we fall not to vice nor sin, but to
exercise and follow virtue by the which we may come and attain to good