Produced by Bruce Albrecht, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net _Wilderness of Spring_ By EDGAR PANGBORN ... For if I am in sore plight, I would not therefore wish affliction to be the lot of all the world. No, indeed, no! since, besides, I am distressed by the fate of my brother Atlas, who, towards the west, stands bearing on his shoulders the pillar of heaven and earth, a burthen not easy for his arms to grasp. --AESCHYLUS, _Prometheus Bound_. _Rinehart & Company, Inc._ NEW YORK TORONTO _Published simultaneously in Canada by Clarke, Irwin & Company, Ltd., Toronto_ Copyright _1958 by Edgar Pangborn Printed in the United States of America All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-5139_ _To my Sister_, MARY C. PANGBORN NOTE: Pastor John Williams of Deerfield is a historical figure; Belding, Stebbins, Hoyt, Wells and Hawks were actual names in the Deerfield of 1704. With these minor exceptions, all characters in this novel are completely fictitious, not intended to suggest any actual person living or dead. The language of the dialogue is a compromise, an attempt to convey some quality of early eighteenth-century speech, but not to create a literal reproduction of it, since that might be tedious and obscure in some places to modern readers. For a literal reproduction the worst nuisance would have been those words, such as "naughty," that have changed not in form but in meaning or emotional charge. I have tried to avoid all these except where the context should make plain their archaic sense. I think the use of "thee" and "thou" is substantially correct. At that time the second person singular could be used in English as in most European languages today, for intimates and children, but the universal "you" was already displacing it. The third person singular verb ending was obsolescent but still in some use; "hath" and "doth" seem to have survived long after the ending was abandoned in other verbs. In the modern (_Everyman_) edition of Montaigne, the essay that Mr. Kenny asks for is entitled "Of Training" instead of "Use Makes Perfect." The copy from Mr. Kenny's library was the seventeenth-century translation by Charles Cotton. My special thanks to Mrs. Kelsey Flower of Deerfield, who gave me welcome aid with the research; and to the personnel of the State Library at Albany, N.Y. for their unfailing helpfulness and courtesy. E.P. PART ONE _Chapter One_