It is not possible to write of this heroic race of men without enthusiasm. But nothing has been further from my mind than the glorifying of a sect. If I were capable of sectarian pride, I should not come upon the platform of Christian union* to display it. There are those, indeed, whose sectarian pride will be offended that I have frankly shown the rude as well as the heroic side of early Methodism. I beg they will remember the solemn obligations of a novelist to tell the truth. Lawyers and even ministers are permitted to speak entirely on one side. But no man is worthy to be called a novelist who does not endeavor with his whole soul to produce the higher form of history, by writing truly of men as they are, and dispassionately of those forms of life that come within his scope. * "The Circuit Rider" originally appeared as a serial in _The Christian Union_. Much as I have laughed at every sort of grotesquerie, I could not treat the early religious life of the West otherwise than with the most cordial sympathy and admiration. And yet this is not a "religious novel," one in which all the bad people are as bad as they can be, and all the good people a little better than they can be. I have not even asked myself what may be the "moral." The story of any true life is wholesome, if only the writer will tell it simply, keeping impertinent preachment of his own out of the way. Doubtless I shall hopelessly damage myself with some good people by confessing in the start that, from the first chapter to the last, this is a love-story. But it is not my fault. It is God who made love so universal that no picture of human life can be complete where love is left out. E. E. BROOKLYN, _March_, 1874. "NEC PROPTER VITAM, VIVENDI PERDERE CAUSAS." THE CIRCUIT RIDER A TALE OF THE HEROIC AGE. _CHAPTER I._ THE CORN-SHUCKING. Subtraction is the hardest "ciphering" in the book. Fifty or sixty years off the date at the head of your letter is easy enough to the "organ of number," but a severe strain on the imagination. It is hard to go back to the good old days your grandmother talks about--that golden age when people were not roasted alive in a sleeping coach, but gently tipped over a toppling cliff by a drunken stage-driver. Grand old times were those in which boys politely took off their hats to preacher or schoolmaster, solacing their fresh young hearts afterward by making mouths at the back of his great-coat. Blessed days! in which parsons wore stiff, white stocks, and walked with starched dignity, and yet were not too good to drink peach-brandy and cherry-bounce with folks; when Congressmen were so honorable that they scorned bribes, and were only kept from killing one another by the exertions of the sergeant-at-arms. It was in those old times of the beginning of the reign of Madison, that the people of the Hissawachee settlement, in Southern Ohio, prepared to attend "the corn-shuckin' down at Cap'n Lumsden's."