Not all the scenes of _Other Main-Travelled Roads_ are of farm life, though rural subjects predominate; and the village life touched upon will be found less forbidding in color. In this I am persuaded my view is sound; for, no matter how hard the villager works, he is not lonely. He suffers in company with his fellows. So much may be called a gain. Then, too, I admit youth and love are able to transform a bleak prairie town into a poem, and to make of a barbed-wire lane a highway of romance. HAMLIN GARLAND. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents PAGE Introductory Verse v Preface vii William Bacon's Man 3 Elder Pill, Preacher 29 A Day of Grace 65 Lucretia Burns 81 Daddy Deering 119 A Stop-Over at Tyre 143 A Division in the Coolly 203 A Fair Exile 245 An Alien in the Pines 263 Before the Low Green Door 293 A Preacher's Love Story 305 An Afterword: of Winds, Snows, and The Stars 350 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- WILLIAM BACON'S MAN I The yellow March sun lay powerfully on the bare Iowa prairie, where the ploughed fields were already turning warm and brown, and only here and there in a corner or on the north side of the fence did the sullen drifts remain, and they were so dark and low that they hardly appeared to break the mellow brown of the fields. There passed also an occasional flock of geese, cheerful harbingers of spring, and the prairie-chickens had set up their morning symphony, wide-swelling, wonderful with its prophecy of the new birth of grass and grain and the springing life of all breathing things. The crow passed now and then, uttering his resonant croak, but the crane had not yet sent forth his bugle note. Lyman Gilman rested on his axe-helve at the woodpile of Farmer Bacon to listen to the music around him. In a vague way he was powerfully moved by it. He heard the hens singing their weird, raucous, monotonous song, and saw them burrowing in the dry chip-dust near him. He saw the young colts and cattle frisking in the sunny space around the straw-stacks, absorbed through his bare arms and uncovered head the heat of the sun, and felt the soft wooing of the air so deeply that he broke into an unwonted exclamation:-- "Glory! we'll be seeding by Friday, sure."