There remains the volume of collected stories, long and short, dealing with varying aspects of home life in the North—or rather in my little part of the North—during the Civil War. These stories are by far closer to my heart than any other work of mine, partly because they seem to me to contain the best things I have done or ever shall do, partly because they are so closely interwoven with the personal memories and experiences of my own childhood—and a little also, no doubt, for the reason that they have not had quite the treatment outside that paternal affection had desired for them. Of all the writers whose books affected my younger years, I think that MM. Erckmann-Chatrian exerted upon me the deepest and most vital influence. I know that my ambition to paint some small pictures of the life of my Valley, under the shadow of the vast black cloud which was belching fire and death on its southern side, in humble imitation of their studies of Alsatian life in the days of the Napoleonic terror, was much more powerful than any impulse directly inspired by any other writers. By this confession I do not at all wish to suggest comparisons. The French writers dealt with a period remote enough to be invested with a haze of romance, and they wrote for a reading public vehemently interested in everything that could be told them about that period. These stories of mine lack these aids—and doubtless much else beside. But they are in large part my own recollections of the dreadful time—the actual things that a boy from five to nine saw and heard about him, while his own relatives were being killed, and his school-fellows orphaned, and women of his neighborhood forced into mourning and despair—and they had a right to be recorded.
A single word in addition to an already over-long preface. The locality which furnishes the scenes of the two contemporary novels and all the War stories may be identified in a general way with Central New York, but in no case is it possible to connect any specific village or town with one actually in existence. The political exigencies of “Seth’s Brother’s Wife” made it necessary to invent a Congressional District, composed of three counties, to which the names of Adams, Jay, and Dearborn were given. Afterwards the smaller places naturally took names reflecting the quaint operation of the accident which sprinkled our section, as it were, with the contents of a classical pepper-box. Thus Octavius, Thessaly, Tyre, and the rest came into being, and one tries to remember and respect the characteristics they have severally developed, but no exact counterparts exist for them in real life, and no map of the district has as yet been drawn, even in my own mind.
H. F.
London, February 16, 1897.