SILAS STRONG, EMPEROR OF THE WOODS By Irving Bacheller New York and London Harper and Brothers Publishers 1906 [Illustration: 0001] [Illustration: 0004] [Illustration: 0005] TO MY FRIEND THE LATE ARCHER BROWN in memory of summer days when we wandered far and sat down to rest by springs and brooks in the doomed empire of Strong and talked of saving it and of better times and knew not they were impossible. Some of the people of these pages, when the author endeavored to regulate their conduct according to well-known rules of literary construction, declared themselves free and independent. When, urged by him, they tried to speak and act in the fashion of most novels, they laughed, and seemed to be ashamed of themselves, and with good reason. They are slow, stubborn, modest, shy, and used to the open. Not for them are the narrow stage, the swift action, the fine-wrought chain of artful incident that characterize a modern romance. Of late authors have succeeded rather well in turning people into animals and animals into people. Why not, if one's art can perform miracles? This book aims not to emulate or amend the work of the Creator. Its people are just folks of a very old pattern, its animals rather common and of small attainments. It is in no sense a literary performance. It pretends to be nothing more than a simple account of one summer's life, pretty much as it was lived, in a part of the Adirondacks. It goes on about as things happen there, with a leisurely pace, like that of the woods lover on a trail who may be halted by nothing more than a flower or a bird-song. One day follows another in the old fashion of those places where men go for rest and avarice quits them with bloody spurs and they forget the calendar and measure time on the dial of the heavens. The book has one high ambition. It has tried to tell the sad story of the wilderness itself--to show, from the woodsman's view-point, the play of great forces which have been tearing down his home and turning it into the flesh and bone of cities. Were it to cause any reader to value what remains of the forest above its market-price and to do his part in checking the greed of the saws, it would be worth while--bad as it is. SILAS STRONG I THE song of the saws began long ago at the mouths of the rivers. Slowly the axes gnawed their way southward, and the ominous, prophetic chant followed them. Men seemed to goad the rivers to increase their speed. They caught and held and harnessed them as if they had been horses and drove them into flumes and leaped them over dams and pulled and hauled and baffled them until they broke away with the power of madness in their rush. But, even then, the current of the rivers would not do; the current of thunderbolts could not have whirled the wheels with speed enough.