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. Like the main-travelled road of life,
it is traversed by many classes of people, but the poor and the
weary predominate.



A BRANCH ROAD


I

"Keep the main-travelled road till you come to a branch leading
off-keep to the right."