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.
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