In the beginning, at least, Father wrote these sketches of his boyhood
and early farm life as a matter of self-defense: I had made a determined
attempt to write them and when I did this I was treading on what was to
him more or less sacred ground, for as he once said in a letter to
me, "You will be homesick; I know just how I felt when I left home
forty-three years ago. And I have been more or less homesick ever since.
The love of the old hills and of Father and Mother is deep in the very
foundations of my being." He had an intense love of his birthplace and
cherished every memory of his boyhood and of his family and of the old
farm high up on the side of Old Clump--"the mountain out of whose loins
I sprang"--so that when I tried to write of him he felt it was time he
took the matter in hand. The following pages are the result.