The Story of Kennett

Story of Kennett, The

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Title: The Story Of Kennett
Author: Bayard Taylor
Release Date: August, 2005 [EBook #8680] [This file was first posted
on July 31, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English

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THE STORY OF KENNETT
BY
BAYARD TAYLOR

PROLOGUE.
TO MY FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS OF KENNETT:
I wish to dedicate this Story to you, not only because some of you
inhabit the very houses, and till the very fields which I have given to
the actors in it, but also because many of you will recognize certain of
the latter, and are therefore able to judge whether they are drawn with
the simple truth at which I have aimed. You are, naturally, the critics
whom I have most cause to fear; but I do not inscribe these pages to
you with the design of purchasing your favor. I beg you all to accept
the fact as an acknowledgment of the many quiet and happy years I
have spent among you; of the genial and pleasant relations into which I
was born, and which have never diminished, even when I have returned
to you from the farthest ends of the earth; and of the use (often
unconsciously to you, I confess,) which I have drawn from your
memories of former days, your habits of thought and of life.
I am aware that truth and fiction are so carefully woven together in this
Story of Kennett, that you will sometimes be at a loss to disentangle
them. The lovely pastoral landscapes which I know by heart, have been
copied, field for field and tree for tree, and these you will immediately
recognize. Many of you will have no difficulty in detecting the
originals of Sandy Flash and Deb. Smith; a few will remember the
noble horse which performed the service I have ascribed to Roger; and
the descendants of a certain family will not have forgotten some of the

pranks of Joe and Jake Fairthorn. Many more than these particulars are
drawn from actual sources; but as I have employed them with a strict
regard to the purposes of the Story, transferring dates and characters at
my pleasure, you will often, I doubt not, attribute to invention that
which I owe to family tradition. Herein, I must request that you will
allow me to keep my own counsel; for the processes which led to the
completed work extend through many previous years, and cannot
readily be revealed. I will only say that every custom I have described
is true to the time, though some of them are now obsolete; that I have
used no peculiar word or phrase of the common dialect of the country
which I have not myself heard; and further, that I owe the chief
incidents of the last chapter, given to me on her death-bed, to the dear
and noble woman whose character (not the circumstances of her life) I
have endeavored to reproduce in that of Martha Deane.
The country life of our part of Pennsylvania retains more elements of
its English origin than that of New England or Virginia. Until within a
few years, the conservative influence of the Quakers was so powerful
that it continued to shape the habits even of communities whose
religious sentiment it failed to reach. Hence, whatever might be
selected as incorrect of American life, in its broader sense, in these
pages, is nevertheless locally true; and to this, at least, all of you, my
Friends and Neighbors, can testify. In these days, when Fiction prefers
to deal with abnormal characters and psychological problems more or
less exceptional or morbid, the attempt to represent the elements of life
in a simple,