The Hidden Children

by Robert W. Chambers, 1914


TO MY MOTHER

Whatever merit may lie in this book is due to her wisdom, her sympathy
and her teaching


AUTHOR'S PREFACE

No undue liberties with history have been attempted in this romance.
Few characters in the story are purely imaginary. Doubtless the
fastidious reader will distinguish these intruders at a glance, and
very properly ignore them. For they, and what they never were, and
what they never did, merely sugar-coat a dose disguised, and gild the
solid pill of fact with tinselled fiction.

But from the flames of Poundridge town ablaze, to the rolling smoke of
Catharines-town, Romance but limps along a trail hewed out for her
more dainty feet by History, and measured inch by inch across the
bloody archives of the nation.

The milestones that once marked that dark and dreadful trail were dead
men, red and white. Today a spider-web of highways spreads over that
Dark Empire of the League, enmeshing half a thousand towns now all
a-buzz by day and all a-glow by night.