Ebook The Fall of the Year

The publishers demanded that chapter to make the book sell. Now the publishers of this book make no such demands. Indeed they have had an expert naturalist and woodsman hunting up and down every line of this book for errors of fact, false suggestions, wrong sentiments, and extraordinaries of every sort. If this book is not exciting it is the publishers' fault. It may not be exciting, but I believe, and hope, that it is true to all of my out of doors, and not untrue to any of yours. The charge of insincerity, the last in the list, concerns the author's style and sentiments. It does not belong in the same category with the other two, for it really includes them. Insincerity is the mother of all the literary sins. If the writer cannot be true to himself, he cannot be true to anything. Children are the particular victims of the evil. How often are children spoken to in baby-talk, gush, hollow ques tions, and a condescension as irritating as coming teeth! They are written to, also, in the same spirit. The temptation to sentimentalize in writing of the beauties of nature is very strong. Raptures run through nature books as regularly as barbs the length of wire fences. The world according to such books is like the Garden of Eden according to Ridinger.