Other Main-Travelled Roads Read online

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  DADDY DEERING]

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  OTHER MAIN-TRAVELLED ROADS

  HAMLIN GARLANDSUNSET EDITION

  HARPER & BROTHERSNEW YORK AND LONDON

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  COPYRIGHT, 1892, 1899, 1910, BY HAMLIN GARLAND

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  PRAIRIE FOLKS

  PIONEERS

  They rise to mastery of wind and snow; They go like soldiers grimly into strife, To colonize the plain; they plough and sow, And fertilize the sod with their own life As did the Indian and the buffalo.

  SETTLERS

  Above them soars a dazzling sky, In winter blue and clear as steel, In summer like an arctic sea Wherein vast icebergs drift and reel And melt like sudden sorcery.

  Beneath them plains stretch far and fair, Rich with sunlight and with rain; Vast harvests ripen with their care And fill with overplus of grain Their square, great bins.

  Yet still they strive! I see them rise At dawn-light, going forth to toil: The same salt sweat has filled my eyes, My feet have trod the self-same soil Behind the snarling plough.

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  PREFACE

  Nearly all the stories in this volume were written at the same time andunder the same impulse as those which compose its companion volume,_Main-Travelled Roads_--and the entire series was the result of asummer-vacation visit to my old home in Iowa, to my father's farm inDakota, and, last of all, to my birthplace in Wisconsin. This happenedin 1887. I was living at the time in Boston, and had not seen the Westfor several years, and my return to the scenes of my boyhood started meupon a series of stories delineative of farm and village life as I knewit and had lived it. I wrote busily during the two years that followed,and in this revised definitive edition of _Main-Travelled Roads_ and itscompanion volume, _Other Main-Travelled Roads_ (compiled from othervolumes which now go out of print), the reader will find all of theshort stories which came from my pen between 1887 and 1889.

  It remains to say that, though conditions have changed somewhat sincethat time, yet for the hired man and the renter farm life in the West isstill a stern round of drudgery. My pages present it--not as the summerboarder or the young lady novelist sees it--but as the working farmerendures it.

  Not all the scenes of _Other Main-Travelled Roads_ are of farm life,though rural subjects predominate; and the village life touched uponwill be found less forbidding in color. In this I am persuaded my viewis sound; for, no matter how hard the villager works, he is not lonely.He suffers in company with his fellows. So much may be called a gain.Then, too, I admit youth and love are able to transform a bleak prairietown into a poem, and to make of a barbed-wire lane a highway ofromance.

  HAMLIN GARLAND.

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  Contents

  PAGE

  Introductory Verse vPreface viiWilliam Bacon's Man 3Elder Pill, Preacher 29A Day of Grace 65Lucretia Burns 81Daddy Deering 119A Stop-Over at Tyre 143A Division in the Coolly 203A Fair Exile 245An Alien in the Pines 263Before the Low Green Door 293A Preacher's Love Story 305An Afterword: of Winds, Snows, and The Stars 350

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