lack and
white.

Possessing this information, we need not examine Mr. W. F. Skene's
learned but unconvincing theory that the author of the fragmentary Latin
work was one Maurice Drummond, out of the Lennox. The hypothesis is that
of Mr. W. F. Skene, and Mr. Felix Skene points out the difficulties which
beset the opinion of his distinguished kinsman. Our Monk is a man of
Fife.

As to the veracity of the following narrative, the translator finds it
minutely corroborated, wherever corroboration could be expected, in the
large mass of documents which fill the five volumes of M. Quicherat's
"Proces de Jeanne d'Arc," in contemporary chronicles, and in MSS. more
recently discovered in French local or national archives. Thus Charlotte
Boucher, Barthelemy Barrette, Noiroufle, the Scottish painter, and his
daughter Elliot, Capdorat, ay, even Thomas Scott, the King's Messenger,
were all real living people, traces of whose existence, with some of
their adventures, survive faintly in brown old manuscripts. Louis de
Coutes, the pretty page of the Maid, a boy of fourteen, may have been
hardly judged by Norman Leslie, but he certainly abandoned Jeanne d'Arc
at her first failure.

So, after explaining the true position and character of our monkish
author and artist, we leave his book to the judgment which it has tarried
for so long.

CHAPTER I--HOW THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN, AND HOW NORMAN LESLIE FLED OUT OF
FIFE

It is not of my own will, nor for my own glory, that I, Norman Leslie,
sometime of Pitcullo, and in religion called Brother Norman, of the Order
of Benedictines, of Dunfermline, indite this book. But on my coming out
of France, in the year of our Lord One thousand four hundred and fifty-
nine, it was laid on me by my Superior, Richard, Abbot in Dunfermline,
that I should abbreviate the Great Chronicle of Scotland, and continue
the same down to our own time. {1} He bade me tell, moreover, all that I
knew of the glorious Maid of France, called Jeanne la Pucelle, in whose
company I was, from her beginning even till her end.

Obedient, therefore, to my Superior, I wrote, in this our cell of
Pluscarden, a Latin book containing the histories of times past, but when
I came to tell of matters wherein, as Maro says, "pars magna fui," I grew
weary of such rude, barbarous Latin as alone I am skilled to indite, for
of the manner Ciceronian, as it is now practised by clerks of Italy, I am
not master: my book, therefore, I