The Girl from the Marsh Croft

Translated from the Swedish By Velma Swanston Howard
Garden City New York DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1916
Copyright, 1910, by Doubleday, Page & Company
All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages.
Readers of Miss Lagerlöf will observe that in this, her latest book, The Girl from the Marsh Croft, the Swedish author has abandoned her former world of Romanticism and has entered the field of Naturalism and Realism.
This writer's romantic style is most marked, perhaps, in her first successful work, Gösta Berling.
How The Story of Gösta Berling grew, and the years required to perfect it, is told in the author's unique literary autobiography, The Story of a Story, which is embodied in the present volume.
In The Girl from the Marsh Croft Miss Lagerlöf has courageously chosen a girl who had gone astray as the heroine of her love story, making her innate honesty and goodness the redemptive qualities which win for her the love of an honest man and the respect and esteem of all.
To the kindness of the publishers of Good Housekeeping , I am indebted for permission to include The Legend of the Christmas Rose in this volume.
This book is translated and published with the sanction of the author, Selma Lagerlöf.
It took place in the court room of a rural district. At the head of the Judges' table sits an old Judge—a tall and massively built man, with a broad, rough-hewn visage. For several hours he has been engaged in deciding one case after another, and finally something like disgust and melancholy has taken hold of him. It is difficult to know if it is the heat and closeness of the court room that are torturing him or if he has become low-spirited from handling all these petty wrangles, which seem to spring from no other cause than to bear witness to people's quarrel-mania, uncharitableness, and greed.
He has just begun on one of the last cases to be tried during the day. It concerns a plea for help in the rearing of a child.