FIRST EDITION.


I may as well confess, what it would be affectation to conceal, that I
am more than pleased with the generous reception accorded to this story
as a serial in the columns of _Hearth and Home_. It has been in my mind
since I was a Hoosier boy to do something toward describing life in the
back-country districts of the Western States. It used to be a matter of
no little jealousy with us, I remember, that the manners, customs,
thoughts, and feelings of New England country people filled so large a
place in books, while our life, not less interesting, not less romantic,
and certainly not less filled with humorous and grotesque material, had
no place in literature. It was as though we were shut out of good
society. And, with the single exception of Alice Gary, perhaps, our
Western writers did not dare speak of the West otherwise than as the
unreal world to which Cooper's lively imagination had given birth.

I had some anxiety lest Western readers should take offence at my
selecting what must always seem an exceptional phase of life to those
who have grown up in the more refined regions of the West. But nowhere
has the School-master been received more kindly than in his own country
and among his own people.

Some of those who have spoken generous words of the School-master and
his friends have suggested that the story is an autobiography. But it is
not, save in the sense in which every work of art is an autobiography:
in that it is the result of the experience and observation of the
writer. Readers will therefore bear in mind that not Ralph nor Bud nor
Brother Sodom nor Dr. Small represents the writer, nor do I appear, as