An English essayist [Footnote: G. K. Chesterton, "The Fallacy of the Young Nation," in his "Heretics," pp. 247-266.] has estimated that we of the United States are no longer young and finds in the fact that we have produced great artists the intimations of age. The art of Whistler and the letters of Henry James are to him the "sweet and startling" but "unmistakable cry of a dying man." But this essayist could not have known the men of the valley which is the heart of the nation as it is the heart of the country, the place of its dominant spirits. That valley, so rapidly exploited of its resources that it has grown ages poorer, is yet virile, youthful in its faults and its achievements. It has no "fine futility" as yet, and the cry is not "sweet" though it may be "startling." It is the shout of a young god, of a Jason driving the bulls in the fields of Colchis. The attenuations of distance may easily deceive one's ears who listens from across the ocean and the mountains. I think it was this same essayist who said that to understand a people one must study them with the "loyalty of a child" and the patience not of a scientist but of a poet. I thank him for that, while I excuse his confounding of sounds that he hears in England from America, and agree that what we need in that valley to tell its story, to interpret it, is not a specialist in statistics nor an annalist, not a critic who looks at the smoke of the chimneys and visits the slaughter-houses only, but a poet who will have the patience to consult both the statistician and the annalist, a patient poet with the "loyalty of a child" toward his theme. EPILOGUE FRANCIS PARKMAN THE HISTORIAN OF FRANCE IN THE NEW WORLD I make the epilogue of this story my tribute to Francis Parkman, who has in a sense made this all possible for me: first, by reason of the love he gave me long ago for his New France with its primeval forests, its virgin prairies, its glistening rivers, its untamed Indians, its explorers, its gray and black cowls, its coureurs de bois, its stars whose light had never before looked on a white face; and second, by reason of the mass of incident and color which he has supplied for the background of the life I have known in that valley.