retains its churchyard cross, almost an isolated instance. The Puritan axe and hammer missed it, no thanks to them. The beautifully-carved fragments of destroyed monasteries, preserved perhaps as relics on our garden rockeries warn us of the dangers of mere formalism in religion. The Puritan spoliation of our holy places warns us against fanaticism and irreverence. Turn neither to the right hand nor to the left. In medio tutissimus ibis. We may well “hark back” to the devotion of our forefathers, but from either extreme, Domine, dirige nos. And now there only remains the duty, or, rather, the privilege, of saying one parting word more. A Preface may be called a pre-post-erous production, because, though standing at the head of a book, it is almost invariably written after the book is finished, and when the author can take a general review of his work. In the present instance this was impossible. The exigencies of the situation—these Records first appearing as a weekly series in “The Horncastle News”—required that the Introduction, to stand at their head, should be written when the work itself was yet only an embryo conceived in the writer’s brain. He may truly be said to have begun _ab ovo_. He knew, indeed, generally, his own intentions, but he could not possibly, as yet, tell the exact form in which they would be embodied, and, as an unavoidable consequence, in the present case, as in not a few others, what should naturally be the head is here found where the tail should be. The real Preface closes, instead of introducing, the writer’s work to his readers. A general outline, indeed, of the work had been laid down on paper more than a dozen years ago. During that interval (as also for several years before it) the materials had been accumulating; but still, when the work actually began to take shape, the writer was standing, as it were, at one end of a coil, of which he could not see the other; the windlass was letting down a chain into depths which his eye could not penetrate, nor his knowledge yet reach. The outline originally sketched out has really in one only particular been departed from, but, in the process of its evolution, the thread has considerably stretched. The Clotho of its destiny has spun a longer web than had been foreseen by the writer. On coming to closer quarters with his subject, materials multiplied beyond his expectations, and but for the pruning knife, the result would have been still larger than it is.