urses of northern New
York. In his place an equally interesting figure--the Adirondack
guide--navigates single-handed the rivers and lakes of the "North
Woods." By one of those curious cases of transference that are often
found in etymology, the guide still carries duffels, like his
predecessor; but not for Indian trading. The word with him covers also
an indefinite collection of objects of manifold use--camp utensils,
guns, fishing tackle, and whatnots. The basket that sits in his light
boat to hold his smaller articles is called a duffel basket, as was the
basket of sundries in the trader's canoe, I fancy. If his camp grows
into a house frequented by sportsmen, there will be a duffel room to
contain all manner of unclassified things.

Like the trader of old New York, I here open my kit of duffels. I have
selected from the shorter tales written by me since I began to deal in
the fancy wares of a writer of fiction only such as seem to have
elements of permanent interest. I find their range to be wide. They
cover many phases of human nature; they describe life in both the
eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries; they are of the East and of
the West, of the North, the Middle, and the South. Group or classify
them I can not; they are too various. Some were written long ago, in my
younger manner, and in the tone prevailing among the story-writers of
those days. Opinions and sentiments are inextricably interwoven with
some of these earlier stories that do not seem to be mine to-day. But a
man in his fifties ought to know how to be tolerant of the enthusiasms
and beliefs of a younger man. I suspect that the sentiment I find
somewhat foreign to me in the season of cooler pulses, and the
situations and motives that seem rather naive now, had something to do
with the acceptability of the stories. The popularity of these early
tales in their day encouraged me to go on, and a little later to set up
in more permanent and wholesale business as a novelist. To certain of
these stories of my apprenticeship I have appended dates to explain
allusions in the text. Other stories there are here, that are of recent
production, and by these I am willing to be judged. The variety in
subject, manner, date, location, makes proper to them the title I have
chosen--a good word with a savor of human history and an odor of the
New World about it; a word yet in living use in this region of lakes
and mountains. I am not without hope that some of my duf