Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1913.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
To
MY FATHER
TO WHOSE EXAMPLE OF SELF-CONTROL AND CHRISTIAN
FORTITUDE, I OWE THE POWER TO LIVE MY
LIFE INDEPENDENT OF EXTERNALS, I
DEDICATE THESE FRAGMENTARY
RECORDS, ON THIS THE ONE
HUNDRED AND TWELFTH
ANNIVERSARY OF
HIS BIRTH
Chicora Wood,
April 21st, 1913.
INTRODUCTION
While the influences and mechanisms of the present world tend to make all parts of it alike in thought and in costume, the various nooks and corners of our own country are gradually losing their original highly accentuated characteristics, and are merging into a general similarity. Most of what you hear and see any morning in the towns of Massachusetts you will hear and see in Omaha, Denver, Seattle, or anywhere else, because the department stores advertise and sell the same kind of clothes everywhere at the same time, and the same news is everywhere published in the daily papers.
Our American literature is therefore very lucky to have produced its Jewetts, Wilkinses, Cables, Craddocks, Pages, and Harrises, who have well set down for our perpetual interest and instruction the evaporating charm of their chosen fields.
Here is another book belonging to this valuable indigenous shelf of ours, a shelf where stand the volumes that tell of people and events that could have been met with nowhere in the world save upon our own native soil. Although it is not fiction, but a record of personal experience, it should prove to many readers as entertaining as our best fiction.