Original (English)

PREFACE The present tale is founded more largely on testimony—oral and written—than any other in this series.  The external incidents which direct its course are mostly an unexaggerated reproduction of the recollections of old persons well known to the author in childhood, but now long dead, who were eye-witnesses of those scenes.  If wholly transcribed their recollections would have filled a volume thrice the length of ‘The Trumpet-Major.’ Down to the middle of this century, and later,