This book is a protest and a deliverance.

For seven years I had written continuously of Canada, though some short stories of South Sea life, and the novel Mrs.Falchion, had, during that time, issued from my pen.
It looked as though I should be writing of the Far North all my life.
Editors had begun to take that view; but from the start it had never been my view.

Even when writing Pierre and His People I was determined that I should not be cabined, cribbed, and confined in one field; that I should not, as some other men have done, wind in upon myself, until at last each succeeding book would be but a variation of some previous book, and I should end by imitating myself, become the sacrifice to the god of the pin-hole.
I was warned not to break away from Canada; but all my life I had been warned, and all my life I had followed my own convictions.

I would rather not have written another word than be corralled, bitted, saddled, and ridden by that heartless broncho-buster, the public, which wants a man who has once pleased it, to do the same thing under the fret of whip and spur for ever.

When I went to the Island of Jersey, in 1897, it was to shake myself free of what might become a mere obsession.