an atmosphere which is not sleep, and which is not absolute wakefulness,
but a place between the two, where the working world is indistinct and
the mind is swept along a flood submerging the self-conscious but not
drowning into unconsciousness.

Such, at any rate, is my own experience. I am convinced that the books
of mine which have had so many friends as this book, 'The Seats of the
Mighty', has had in the English-speaking world were written in just such
conditions of temperamental isolation or absorption. First the subject,
which must of itself have driving power, then the main character, which
becomes a law working out its own destiny; and the subject in my own work
has always been translatable into a phrase. Nearly every one of my books
has always been reducible to its title.

For years I had wished to write an historical novel of the conquest
of Canada or the settlement of the United Empire loyalists and the
subsequent War of 1812, but the central idea and the central character
had not come to me; and without both and the driving power of a big idea
and of a big character, a book did not seem to me possible. The human
thing with the grip of real life was necessary. At last, as pointed out
in the prefatory note of the first edition, published in the spring of
1896 by Messrs. D. Appleton & Co., of New York, and Messrs. Methuen &
Co., of London, I ran across a tiny little volume in the library of Mr.
George M. Fairchild, Jr., of Quebec, called the Memoirs of Major Robert
Stobo. It was published by John S. Davidson, of Market Street,
Pittsburgh, with an introduction by an editor who signed himself
"N. B.C."

The Memoirs proper contained about seventeen thousand words, the
remaining three thousand words being made up of abstracts and appendices