This book is not a novel.

Preface, 1910.

The preface to the first edition of this story, written twenty years ago, laboured to explain that all the characters were real people.

Preface, 1930.

Brother Richard:
Being in the throes of earthquake, a while since, in moving house from Gray's Inn, where, as thou knowest, my books so multiplied that every room was filled, nay, choked, and I was driven to lie of nights in the lobby; I had occasion, but rarely by unkind fortune vouchsafed, to look within the volumes I love.

Dutch Agnes her valentine [Two letters introductory].

This day, being St. Stephen's day, and therefore a holiday alike to my school-children and their master and moreover a day of snow, half thawed, in which I care not, as my use is of a holiday, to take the air in walking abroard, I have made a book; nay, two books.

The journal of the curate of Coniston.