Excerpt from Norwood: Or, Village Life in New England Life Before the Civil War, I had for several years been a regular contributor to the New York Ledger. During that great conflict I had almost entirely ceased writing for it. But when the war was closed, I was not unwilling to seek rest or relaxation from the exhausting excitement of public affairs, by turning my mind into entirely new channels of thought and interest. In this mood I received Mr. Bonner's proposal to write a story for the Ledger. Had it been a request to carve a statue or build a man-of-war, the task would hardly have seemed less likely of accomplishment. A very moderate reader, even, of fictions, I had never studied the mystery of their construction. Plot and counterplot, the due proportion of parts, the whole machinery of a novel, seemed hopelessly outside of my studies. But after-considerations came to my relief. I reflected that any real human experience was intrisically interesting; that the life of a humble family for a single day, even if not told as skilfully as Wordsworth sung the humble aspects of the natural world, or as minutely faithful as Crabbe depicted English village-life, could hardly fail to win some interest. The habit of looking upon men as the children of God, and heirs of immorality, can hardly fail to clothe the simplest and most common elements of daily life with importance, and even with dignity. Nothing is trivial in the education of the King's Son! About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.