Main-Travelled Roads | Page 4

in
any substantial way added to my despairing mood.
My savings for the two years of my teaching in Boston were not
sufficient to enable me to purchase my return ticket, and when my
father offered me a stacker's wages in the harvest field I accepted and
for two weeks or more proved my worth with the fork, which was still
mightier-with me-than the pen.
However, I did not entirely neglect the pen. In spite of the dust and heat
of the wheat rieks I dreamed of poems and stories. My mind teemed
with subjects for fiction, and one Sunday morning I set to work on a

story which had been suggested to me by a talk with my mother, and a
few hours later I read to her (seated on the low sill of that treeless
cottage) the first two thousand words of "Mrs. Ripley's Trip," the first
of the series of sketches which became Main-Travelled Roads.
I did not succeed in finishing it, however, till after my return to Boston
in September. During the fall and winter of '87 and the winter and
spring of '88, I wrote the most of the stories in Main-Travelled Roads, a
novelette for the Century Magazine, and a play called "Under the
Wheel." The actual work of the composition was carried on m the south
attic room of Doctor Cross's house at 21 Seaverns Avenue, Jamaica
Plain.
The mood of bitterness in which these books were written was renewed
and augmented by a second visit to my parents in 1889, for during my
stay my mother suffered a stroke of paralysis due to overwork and the
dreadful heat of the summer. She grew better before the time came for
me to return to my teaching in Boston, but I felt like a sneak as I took
my way to the train, leaving my mother and sister on that bleak and
sun-baked plain.
"Old Paps Flaxen," "Jason Edwards," "A Spoil of Office," and most of
the stories gathered into the second volume of Main-Travelled Roads
were written in the shadow of these defeats. If they seem unduly
austere, let the reader remember the times in which they were
composed. That they were true of the farms of that day no one can
know better than I, for I was there-a farmer.
Life on the farms of Iowa and Wisconsin-even on the farms of
Dakota-has gained in beauty and security, I will admit, but there are
still wide stretches of territory in Kansas and Nebraska where the
farmhouse is a lonely shelter. Groves and lawns, better roads, the rural
free delivery, the telephone, and the motorcar have done much to bring
the farmer into a frame of mind where he is contented with his lot, but
much remains to be done before the stream of young life from the
country to the city can be checked.
The two volumes of Main-Travelled Roads can now be taken to be

what William Dean Howells called them, "historical fiction," for they
form a record of the farmer's life as I lived it and studied it. In these
two books is a record of the privations and hardships of the men and
women who subdued the midland wilderness and prepared the way for
the present golden age of agriculture.
HG. March 1, 1922
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.

A BRANCH ROAD
I
"Keep the main-travelled road till you come to a branch leading
off-keep to the right."
IN the windless September dawn a voice went singing, a man's voice,
singing a cheap and common air. Yet something in the elan of it all told
he was young, jubilant, and a happy lover.
Above the level belt of timber to the east a vast dome of pale
undazzling gold was rising, silently and swiftly. Jays called in the
thickets where the maples flamed amid the green oaks, with irregular
splashes of red and orange. The grass was crisp with frost under the
feet, the road smooth and gray-white in color, the air was indescribably
sweet, resonant, and stimulating. No wonder the man sang.

He came Into view