Joel: A Boy of Galilee $1.50 In the Desert of Waiting .50 The Three Weavers .50 Keeping Tryst .50 The Legend of the Bleeding Heart .50 The Rescue of the Princess Winsome .50 The Jester's Sword .50 Asa Holmes 1.00 L. C. PAGE & COMPANY 53 Beacon Street Boston, Mass. [Illustration: TRAVELERS FIVE ALONG LIFE'S HIGHWAY] Travelers Five Along Life's Highway Jimmy, Gideon Wiggan, The Clown, Wexley Snathers, Bap. Sloan BY Annie Fellows Johnston Author of "The Little Colonel Series," "Asa Holmes," "Joel: A Boy of Galilee," etc. With a Foreword by Bliss Carman Frontispiece in full colour from a painting by Edmund H. Garrett [Illustration: Emblem] L. C. Page & Company Boston [Illustration: Flower] Mdccccxi _Copyright, 1901, 1904, by_ THE SHORTSTORY PUBLISHING COMPANY _Copyright, 1899, by_ THE S. S. MCCLURE CO. _Copyright, 1903, by_ THE CENTURY CO. _Copyright, 1911, by_ L. C. PAGE & COMPANY (INCORPORATED) _All rights reserved_ First impression, October, 1911 _Electrotyped and Printed by THE COLONIAL PRESS C. H. Simonds & Co., Boston. U. S. A._ Foreword OF all the elements that go to make up a good story,--plot, verisimilitude, happy incident, local colour, excellent style,--none perhaps is more important than the touch of understanding sympathy. The writer must not only see his characters clearly and draw them with a masterly hand; he must have the largeness of heart that can share in all the turbulent experience of the human spirit. His people must be set against the vast shifting background of destiny. He must show their dramatic relations, one to another, and the influence of life upon life; he must also show their profounder, more moving and mysterious, relations to fate and time and the infinite things. The writer of fiction creates for us a mimic country, peoples it with creatures of the fancy, like ourselves and yet different, and asks us to stray for our entertainment through that new kingdom. The scenes may be as strange or as familiar as you please; the characters as commonplace or as exceptional as you will; yet they must always be within the range of our sympathy. The incidents must be such as we ourselves could pass through; the people must be such as we can understand. They may well be exceptional, for that enlists our interest and enlivens our curiosity; they must not be beyond our comprehension nor outside our spiritual pale, for then we could have no sympathy with them, and our hearts would only grow cold as we read.