Other Main-Travelled Roads

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Nearly all the stories in this volume were written at the same time and under the same impulse as those which compose its companion volume, Main-Travelled Roads—and the entire series was the result of a summer-vacation visit to my old home in Iowa, to my father\'s farm in Dakota, and, last of all, to my birthplace in Wisconsin. This happened in 1887. I was living at the time in Boston, and had not seen the West for several years, and my return to the scenes of my boyhood started me upon a series of stories delineative of farm and village life as I knew it and had lived it. I wrote busily during the two years that followed, and in this revised definitive edition of Main-Travelled Roads and its companion volume, Other Main-Travelled Roads (compiled from other volumes which now go out of print), the reader will find all of the short stories which came from my pen between 1887 and 1889. It remains to say that, though conditions have changed somewhat since that time, yet for the hired man and the renter farm life in the West is still a stern round of drudgery. My pages present it—not as the summer boarder or the young lady novelist sees it—but as the working farmer endures it. Not all the scenes of Other Main-Travelled Roads are of farm life, though rural subjects predominate; and the village life touched upon will be found less forbidding in color. In this I am persuaded my view is sound; for, no matter how hard the villager works, he is not lonely. He suffers in company with his fellows. So much may be called a gain. Then, too, I admit youth and love are able to transform a bleak prairie town into a poem, and to make of a barbed-wire lane a highway of romance. HAMLIN GARLAND.