local legends, but I have no use for them in a fictitious ghost story. Again, I feel that the technical terms of “occultism,” if they are not very carefully handled, tend to put the mere ghost story (which is all that I am attempting) upon a quasi-scientific plane, and to call into play faculties quite other than the imaginative. I am well aware that mine is a nineteenth- (and not a twentieth-) century conception of this class of tale; but were not the prototypes of all the best ghost stories written in the sixties and seventies?
However, I cannot claim to have been guided by any very strict rules. My stories have been produced (with one exception) at successive Christmas seasons. If they serve to amuse some readers at the Christmas-time that is coming— or at any time whatever—they will justify my action in publishing them.
My thanks are due to the Editor of the Contemporary Review, in which one of the stories (“The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral”) appeared, for permission to reprint it here.
M. R. JAMES.
