The Project Gutenberg EBook of Eben Holden, by Irving Bacheller

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Title: Eben Holden
A Tale of the North Country

Author: Irving Bacheller

Posting Date: December 8, 2008 [EBook #2799]
Release Date: September, 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EBEN HOLDEN ***

Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer, and Martin Robb

EBEN HOLDEN, A TALE OF THE NORTH COUNTRY

By Irving Bacheller

PREFACE

Early in the last century the hardy wood-choppers began to come west,
out of Vermont. They founded their homes in the Adirondack wildernesses
and cleared their rough acres with the axe and the charcoal pit. After
years of toil in a rigorous climate they left their sons little besides
a stumpy farm and a coon-skin overcoat. Far from the centres of life
their amusements, their humours, their religion, their folk lore,
their views of things had in them the flavour of the timber lands, the
simplicity of childhood. Every son was nurtured in the love of honour
and of industry, and the hope of sometime being president. It is to be
feared this latter thing and the love of right living, for its own sake,
were more in their thoughts than the immortal crown that had been the
inspiration of their fathers. Leaving the farm for the more promising
life of the big city they were as men born anew, and their second
infancy was like that of Hercules. They had the strength of manhood,
the tireless energy of children and some hope of the highest things.
The pageant of the big town--its novelty, its promise, its art, its
activity--quickened their highest powers, put them to their best effort.
And in all great enterprises they became the pathfinders, like their
fathers in the primeval forest.

This book has grown out of such enforced leisure as one may find in a
busy life. Chapters begun in the publicity of a Pullman car have been
finished in the cheerless solitude of a hotel chamber. Some have
had their beginning in a sleepless night and their end in a day of
bronchitis. A certain pious farmer in the north country when, like
Agricola, he was about to die, requested the doubtful glory of this
epitaph: 'He was a