My dark mood was deepened into bitterness by my father's farm,
where I found my mother imprisoned in a small cabin on the
enormous sunburned, treeless plain, with no expectation of ever
living anywhere else. Deserted by her sons and failing in health,
she endured the discomforts of her life uncomplainingly-but my
resentment of "things as they are" deepened during my talks with
her neighbors, who were all housed in the same unshaded cabins in
equal poverty and loneliness. The fact that at twenty-seven I was
without power to aid my mother in any substantial way added to
my despairing mood.

My savings for the two years of my teaching in Boston were not
sufficient to enable me to purchase my return ticket, and when my
father offered me a stacker's wages in the harvest field I accepted
and for two weeks or more proved my worth with the fork, which
was still mightier-with me-than the pen.

However, I did not entirely neglect the pen. In spite of the dust and
heat of the wheat rieks I dreamed of poems and stories. My mind
teemed with subjects for fiction, and one Sunday morning I set to
work on a story which had been suggested to me by a talk with my
mother, and a few hours later I read to her (seated on the low sill
of that treeless cottage) the first two thousand words of "Mrs.
Ripley's Trip," the first of the series of sketches which became
Main-Travelled Roads.

I did not succeed in finishing it, however, till after my return to
Boston in September. During the fall and winter of '87 and the
winter and spring of '88, I wrote the most of the stories in
Main-Travelled Roads, a novelette for the Century Magazine, and