Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE By William Dean Howells In a region which he has made his peculiar field Mr. Hamlin Garland has possessed himself of that farthest West of mountains and mining towns, of clouds and woods, where in his latest book he invites the reader home with him. They of the High Trails is a succession of romances kindred in spirit with those stories of Main- Travelled Roads where we own we enjoyed the level footing more and got our breath better in the lower altitude. But this is only a way of owning ourselves older than the actual generation; and if we cannot mount so alertly into the thin air where the author rejoices in his strength,, it is not saying that he is not as strong as ever. £His climb was inevitable, and with his increasing knowledge of the Farthest West his grapple with its persons and events must comeT) These stories are a sort of re'sume' of the motives and ideals of his later novels, but, with the franker drawing and the bolder coloring, he holds himself true to his earlier allegiance. His men "of the high trails," his miners and hunters, his scouts and rangers, have the reach and lift of the vast spaces and lofty summits where their lives are mostly passed; but their humanness, not their heroicism, is offered as the precious thing! Their contact with the civilization of the East C—' xi as it penetrates on business or pleasure to their primitive Westernness forms one of the author's opportunities of drama which you can trust him not to abuse to the effects of melodrama. The loves of these mighty fellows, and their gain or loss of the daughters of wealth adventuring in their wilderness, is poetry of a wonted strain, heard from the beginning of romance in tales of adventure, but the love-making which goes hand in hand and heart to heart with danger and d...