Publisher's Synopsis
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: DEDICATION TO WILLIAM CHAMBERS, Esq. Sir, ?In inscribing to you the accompanying narrative, I have been guided, mainly, by the high opinion which I have ever entertained of your unremitting exertions in the diffusion of profitable knowledge. I can recall the day when the earliest of your publications for the people made its appearance. 1 was then in my twenty-first year, with Leith Walk and its surroundings as familiar, perhaps, to me as to yourself, which not a little enhanced the interest that I took in your adventure. From, then to the present time, no observer can have failed to notice, and no candid mind but will acknowledge the giant share which it and its successors have had, not only in .cultivating the taste of the public, but in awakening in those for whom they were more especially intended an ambition for still higher attainments. Although the English agricultural labourer, in whose behalf the following pages have been written, can hardly, in the comparative darkness that still begirts him, be said to have been more than reached by your endeavours, you have been instrumental, and more so than any one I could name, by quickening the sympathy of those better circumstanced, in furnishing him, and when most needed, with friends and upholders- It would, indeed, be disheartening to suppose that labours, so fruitful elsewhere, had in one direction been entirely barren. There is no name, moreover, it would seem, that could bo here introduced with so much propriety as your own, from the circumstance that it was an account in Things as they are in America, of the hopeless prospect of a Scottish ploughman in his old age, that determined me to write some such work as The Village orMehrow. This was many years ago. I was then living in a log house, on a farm embosome...
