To
My Father and Mother
Whose Half-Century Pilgrimage on the Main-Travelled Road of Life Has Brought Them Only Toil and Deprivation, This Book of Stories Is Dedicated By a Son to Whom Every Day Brings a Deepening Sense of His Parents' Silent Heroism
Opening Thought
The main-travelled road in the West (as everywhere) is hot and dusty in summer, and desolate and drear with mud in fall and spring, and in winter the winds sweep the snow across it; but it does sometimes cross a rich meadow where the songs of the larks and bobolinks and blackbirds are tangled. Follow it far enough, it may lead past a bend in the river where the water laughs eternally over its shallows.
Mainly it is long and wearyful, and has a dull little town at one end and a home of toil at the other. Like the main-travelled road of life it is traversed by many classes of people, but the poor and the weary predominate.
Table of Contents.
| Foreword | [xi] |
| Introduction | [1] |
| A Branch Road | [7] |
| Up the Coolly | [67] |
| Among the Corn-Rows | [131] |
| The Return of a Private | [167] |
| Under the Lion's Paw | [195] |
| The Creamery Man | [219] |
| A Day's Pleasure | [245] |
| Mrs. Ripley's Trip | [261] |
| Uncle Ethan Ripley | [281] |
| God's Ravens | [301] |
| A "Good-Fellow's" Wife | [327] |