Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to the corresponding illustrations.
The illustration near page 199 includes a numbered key, but some of the numbers in the illustration are hard to find or read. The Transcriber has included two versions of this illustration: the original and an annotated one, in which those numbers appear in red (or gray, depending on the reading device). Two of those numbers, 1 and 18, may be in the wrong places.
The key numbers in the illustration near page 319 are the original ones. They are in ascending sequence clockwise, with the exception of 12 and 11.
The map following page 520 did not have a caption. As it was the only illustration in the book without a caption, Transcriber copied its description from the List of Illustrations and used it as the caption.
The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references. Most of the references are to pages in the other three volumes of this series; all four volumes are available at no charge at Project Gutenberg:
Volume I: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71794
Volume II: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71795
Volume III: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71796
Volume IV: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71797
In the original book, the index entries for "Biddle, Captain Nicholas" referring to Volume II. actually refer to his nephew, "Biddle, James", and some of those are in Volume III. In this ebook, those entries have been corrected, but the index may contain other errors.