happy here.
Father is a borderman. He would enjoy coming east on a visit, but to
shut him up in Boston would be like caging an eagle. The case seems
hopeless."

The more we discussed it the more insoluble the problem became. The best
we could do was to write often and to plan for frequent visits to them.

One day, late in March, Flower, who had been using my stories in almost
every issue of his magazine, said to me: "Why don't you put together
some of your tales of the west, and let us bring them out in book form?
I believe they would have instant success."

His words delighted me for I had not yet begun to hope for an appearance
as the author of a book. Setting to work at once to prepare such a
volume I put into it two unpublished novelettes called _Up the Cooley_
and _The Branch Road_, for the very good reason that none of the
magazines, not even _The Arena_, found them "available." This reduced
the number of sketches to six so that the title page read:

MAIN TRAVELLED ROADS
Six Mississippi Valley Stories
BY HAMLIN GARLAND

The phrase "main travelled road" is common in the west. Ask a man to
direct you to a farmhouse and he will say, "Keep the main travelled road
till you come to the second crossing and turn to the left." It seemed to
me not only a picturesque title, significant of my native country, but
one which permitted the use of a grimly sardonic foreword. This I
supplied.

"The main travelled road in the west (as everywhere) is hot and dusty in
summer and desolate and drear with mud in fall and spring, and in winter
the winds sweep the snows across it, but it does sometimes cross a rich
meadow where the songs of the larks and blackbirds and bobolinks are
tangled. Follow it far enough, it may lead past a bend in the river
where the water laughs eternally over its shallows. Mainly it is long
and weariful and has a dull little town at one end, and a home of toil
at the other. Like the main travelled road of life it is traversed by
many classes of people, but the poor and the weary predominate."

This, my first book, was put together during a time of deep personal
sorrow. My little sister died suddenly, leaving my father and mother
alone on the bleak plain, seventeen hundred miles from both their sons.
Hopelessly crippled, my mother now mourned the loss of her "baby" and
the soldier's keen eyes grew dim, for he loved this little daughter
above anything else in the world. The flag of his sunset march was