drooping on its staff. Nothing but poverty and a lonely old age seemed
before him, and yet, in his letters to me, he gave out only the briefest
hints of his despair.

All this will explain, if the reader is interested to know, why the
dedication of my little book was bitter with revolt: "To my father and
mother, whose half-century of pilgrimage on the main travelled road of
life has brought them only pain and weariness, these stories are
dedicated by a son to whom every day brings a deepening sense of his
parents' silent heroism." It will explain also why the comfortable, the
conservative, those who farmed the farmer, resented my thin gray volume
and its message of acrid accusation.

It was published in 1891 and the outcry against it was instant and
astonishing--to me. I had a foolish notion that the literary folk of the
west would take a local pride in the color of my work, and to find
myself execrated by nearly every critic as "a bird willing to foul his
own nest" was an amazement. Editorials and criticisms poured into the
office, all written to prove that my pictures of the middle border were
utterly false.

Statistics were employed to show that pianos and Brussels carpets
adorned almost every Iowa farmhouse. Tilling the prairie soil was
declared to be "the noblest vocation in the world, not in the least like
the pictures this eastern author has drawn of it."

True, corn was only eleven cents per bushel at that time, and the number
of alien farm-renters was increasing. True, all the bright boys and
girls were leaving the farm, following the example of my critics, but
these I was told were all signs of prosperity and not of decay. The
American farmer was getting rich, and moving to town, only the renters
and the hired man were uneasy and clamorous.

My answer to all this criticism was a blunt statement of facts. "Butter
is not always golden nor biscuits invariably light and flaky in my farm
scenes, because they're not so in real life," I explained. "I grew up on
a farm and I am determined once for all to put the essential ugliness of
its life into print. I will not lie, even to be a patriot. A proper
proportion of the sweat, flies, heat, dirt and drudgery of it all shall
go in. I am a competent witness and I intend to tell the whole truth."

But I didn't! Even my youthful zeal faltered in the midst of a
revelation of the lives led by the women on the farms of the middle
border. Before the tragic futility of th