An opinion I have stated before is that a writer of romance is not an historian, nor can he ever be judged as such, though his pages may carry more of history and truer history of a certain people and time than has been written. For, as there are times in an historical novel when fact insists upon drawing a sombre cloud between romance and its fulfilment, so there are times when the necessities of romance make permissible that poetic licence which writers of fiction have been granted from the remoteness of the ancients, and which will persist further ahead than we can possibly see into the future. In The Plains of Abraham I have made an humble effort to "carry on" with the same fidelity to truth that I prescribed for myself in my first historical romance,