Copyright, 1919,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
All rights reserved
Dedication
TO ALL THE LITTLE ONE-HORSE TOWNS WHERE
LIFE IS SWEET AND ROOMY AND OLD-FASHIONED;
WHERE THE DAYS ARE FULL OF SUNSHINE AND
RAIN AND WORK; WHERE NEIGHBORS REALLY
NEIGHBOR AND MEN AND WOMEN ARE LIFE-SIZE
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This book was written to cure a heartache, to ease a very real and bad case of homesickness. I wrote it just for myself when I was very nearly ten thousand miles away from home and knew that I couldn't go back to the U. S. A. for two long years. It is a picture of a little Yankee town, the town I tried so hard to see over ten thousand miles of gray-green ocean.
When I was sailing from New York for South America that sunny June morning in 1913, about the last thing the last friend hurrying down the gangplank said was this:
"Of course you are going to be homesick. But it's worth it."
And I laughed.
But before that long stretch of gray-green ocean was plowed under I knew—oh, I knew—that I was going to be most woefully homesick for the U. S. A.
A certain tall Swede from New Jersey and I discovered that fact about the same minute Fourth of July morning. We were standing on the deck, staring miserably back over the awful miles to where somewhere in that lost north our town lay with flags fluttering, picnic baskets getting into trains and everybody out on their lawns and porches.