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.