PREFACE BY WILLA CATHER ix I. THE RETURN 1 II. MRS. TODD 3 III. THE SCHOOLHOUSE 11 IV. AT THE SCHOOLHOUSE WINDOW 15 V. CAPTAIN LITTLEPAGE 20 VI. THE WAITING PLACE 31 VII. THE OUTER ISLAND 42 VIII. GREEN ISLAND 48 IX. WILLIAM 66 X. WHERE PENNYROYAL GREW 72 XI. THE OLD SINGERS 80 XII. A STRANGE SAIL 86 XIII. POOR JOANNA 98 XIV. THE HERMITAGE 115 XV. ON SHELL-HEAP ISLAND 127 XVI. THE GREAT EXPEDITION 134 XVII. A COUNTRY ROAD 144 XVIII. THE BOWDEN REUNION 156 XIX. THE FEAST’S END 175 XX. ALONG SHORE 184 XXI. A DUNNET SHEPHERDESS 207 XXII. THE QUEEN’S TWIN 242 XXIII. WILLIAM’S WEDDING 279 XXIV. THE BACKWARD VIEW 300 PREFACE _But give to thine own story Simplicity, with glory._ LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY In reading over a package of letters from Sarah Orne Jewett, I find this observation: “_The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper—whether little or great, it belongs to Literature._” Miss Jewett was very conscious of the fact that when a writer makes anything that belongs to Literature (limiting the term here to imaginative literature, which she of course meant), his material goes through a process very different from that by which he makes merely a good story or a good novel. No one can exactly define this process; but certainly persistence, survival, recurrence in the writer’s mind, are highly characteristic of it. The shapes and scenes that have “teased” the mind for years, when they do at last get themselves rightly put down, make a very much higher order of writing, and a much more costly, than the most vivid and vigorous transfer of immediate impressions.