SAM SHIRK: A TALE OF THE WOODS OF MAINE.
BYGEORGE H. DEVEREUX.
NEW YORK: PUBLISHED BY HURD AND HOUGHTON. Cambridge: Riverside Press.
1871.Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by GEORGE H. DEVEREUX, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY.
PREFACE
THIS volume is a simple outgrowth of the experience of ten years of my own life. In early manhood, circumstances led me into the very bosom of such scenes as are here described. Their novelty, as well as their peculiar and intrinsic interest, made a strong impression upon my mind. I was irresistibly led, from time to time, to make disjointed sketches of incidents that were to me full of curiosity and instruction. Long after my return to a very different physical and social sphere, these fragments of an era in my existence—pleasant while it was passing, and agreeable to remember—acquired a new value to my feelings. I felt an inclination to connect them together in a symmetrical shape, as a child strings its treasured beads upon a thread.
I now place it before the public,—hoping it may afford some instruction and pleasure to others; as the real life, of which it is intended to be a picture, did, in a large measure, to myself.
As to the execution of the work, the only thing which it becomes me to say is, that it has been made page: iv-1[View Page iv-1] true and faithful in its delineation of the matters with which it deals, to the best of my power.
Those familiar to the locality will perhaps recognize a single approximation to a portrait of one now too long and too far removed to be anywise affected by any allusions of the sort. In all other respects, I emphatically disown the smallest attempt at personality.
G. H. D.
