in memory of summer days when we wandered far and sat down to rest by
springs and brooks in the doomed empire of Strong and talked of saving
it and of better times and knew not they were impossible.
Some of the people of these pages, when the author endeavored to
regulate their conduct according to well-known rules of literary
construction, declared themselves free and independent. When, urged by
him, they tried to speak and act in the fashion of most novels, they
laughed, and seemed to be ashamed of themselves, and with good reason.
They are slow, stubborn, modest, shy, and used to the open. Not for them
are the narrow stage, the swift action, the fine-wrought chain of artful
incident that characterize a modern romance.
Of late authors have succeeded rather well in turning people into
animals and animals into people. Why not, if one's art can perform
miracles? This book aims not to emulate or amend the work of the
Creator. Its people are just folks of a very old pattern, its animals
rather common and of small attainments. It is in no sense a literary
performance. It pretends to be nothing more than a simple account of
one summer's life, pretty much as it was lived, in a part of the
Adirondacks. It goes on about as things happen there, with a leisurely
pace, like that of the woods lover on a trail who may be halted by
nothing more than a flower or a bird-song. One day follows another in
the old fashion of those places where men go for rest and avarice quits
them with bloody spurs and they forget the calendar and measure time on
the dial of the heavens.
The book has one high ambition. It has tried to tell the sad story of
the wilderness itself--to show, from the woodsman's view-point, the play
of great forces which have been tearing down his home and turning it
into the flesh and bone of cities.
Were it to cause any reader to value what remains of the forest above
its market-price and to do his part in checking the greed of the saws,
it would be worth while--bad as it is.