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In accordance with a fashion which has recently become common, I am issuing my four volumes of ghost stories under one cover, and appending to them some matter of the same kind.

I am told they have given pleasure of a certain sort to my readers: if so, my whole object in writing them has been attained, and there does not seem to be much reason for prefacing them by a disquisition upon how I came to write them. Still, a preface is demanded by my publishers, and it may as well be devoted to answering questions which I have been asked.

First, whether the stories are based on my own experience? To this the answer is No: except in one case, specified in the text, where a dream furnished a suggestion. Or again, whether they are versions of other people's experiences? No. Or suggested by books? This is more difficult to answer concisely. Other people have written of dreadful spiders—for instance, Erckmann-Chatrian in an admirable story called L'Araignée Crabe—and of pictures which came alive: the State Trials give the language of Judge Jeffreys and the courts at the end of the seventeenth century: and so on. Places have been more prolific in suggestion: if anyone is curious about my local settings, let it be recorded that S. Bertrand de Comminges and Viborg are real places: that in Oh, Whistle, and I'll come to you, I had Felixstowe in mind; in A School Story, Temple Grove, East Sheen; in The Tractate Middoth, Cambridge University Library; in Martin's Close, Sampford Courtenay in Devon: that the cathedrals of Barchester and Southminster were blends of Canterbury, Salisbury, and Hereford: that Herefordshire was the imagined scene of A View from a Hill, and Seaburgh in A Warning to the Curious is Aldeburgh in Suffolk.

I am not conscious of other obligations to literature or local legend, written or oral, except in so far as I have tried to make my ghosts act in ways not inconsistent with the rules of folklore. As for the fragments of ostensible erudition which are scattered about my pages, hardly anything in them is not pure invention; there never was, naturally, any such book as that which I quote in the Treasure of Abbot Thomas.

Other questioners ask if I have any theories as to the writing of ghost stories. None that are worthy of the name or need to be repeated here: some thoughts on the subject are in a preface to Ghosts and Marvels. [The World's Classics, Oxford, 1924.] There is no receipt for success in this form of fiction more than in any other. The public, as Dr. Johnson said, are the ultimate judges: if they are pleased, it is well; if not, it is no use to tell them why they ought to have been pleased.

Supplementary questions are: Do I believe in ghosts? To which I answer that I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me. And lastly, Am I going to write any more ghost stories? To which I fear I must answer, Probably not.

Since we are nothing if not bibliographical nowadays, I add a paragraph or two setting forth the facts about the several collections and their contents.

"Ghost Stories of an Antiquary" was published (like the rest) by Messrs. Arnold in 1904. The first issue had four illustrations by the late James McBryde. In this volume Canon Alberic's Scrap-book was written in 1894 and printed soon after in the National Review: Lost Hearts appeared in the Pall Mall Magazine. Of the next five stories, most of which were read to friends at Christmas-time at King's College, Cambridge, I only recollect that I wrote Number 13 in 1899, while The Treasure of Abbot Thomas was composed in summer 1904.

The second volume, "More Ghost Stories," appeared in 1911. The first six of the seven tales it contains were Christmas productions, the very first (A School Story) having been made up for the benefit of the King's College Choir School. The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral was printed in the Contemporary Review: Mr. Humphreys and his Inheritance was written to fill up the volume.

"A Thin Ghost and Others" was the third collection, containing five stories and published in 1919. In it, An Episode of Cathedral History and The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance were contributed to the Cambridge Review.

Of six stories in "A Warning to the Curious," published in 1925, the first, The Haunted Dolls' House, was written for the library of Her Majesty the Queen's Dolls' House, and subsequently appeared in the Empire Review. The Uncommon Prayer-book saw the light in the Atlantic Monthly, the title-story in the London Mercury, and another, I think A Neighbour's Landmark, in an ephemeral called The Eton Chronic. Similar ephemerals were responsible for all but one of the appended pieces (not all of them strictly stories), whereof one, Rats, composed for At Random, was included by Lady Cynthia Asquith in a collection entitled Shudders. The exception, Wailing Well, was written for the Eton College troop of Boy Scouts, and read at their camp-fire at Worbarrow Bay in August, 1927. It was then printed by itself in a limited edition by Robert Gathorne Hardy and Kyrle Leng at the Mill House Press, Stanford Dingley.

Four or five of the stories have appeared in collections of such things in recent years, and a Norse version of four from my first volume, by Ragnhild Undset, was issued in 1919 under the title of Aander og Trolddom.

M. R. JAMES.