Chapter I: Introductory

When I was a child, as young as some of the children who may read this story, I brought from the Sunday school one afternoon the story of “Ruth Lee.” The day was warm and bright, and the summer sunshine fell softly on the grass in the old orchard, where, beneath an apple-tree, I sat down to read about Ruth and her half-brother Reuben, to whom she was always so kind, even when he was cross and irritable. The story was not a long one, and I read it very rapidly, growing more and more interested with every page, and wishing so much that I knew just where the brother and sister lived, and if Ruth still watched the web of cloth bleaching on the mountain side, or Reuben in a pet threw his piece of pie over the ledge of rocks, where his good, patient sister could not get it. To me every word was true. I believed in Ruth and Reuben. I knew just how they looked—Ruth with her grave, womanly face and soft brown eyes, and Reuben with his rosy cheeks, and round, hard head, which he sometimes bumped upon the floor when in one of his passions. I could see him bumping his head—could see Ruth, too, trying to quiet and soothe him. I would imitate her, I thought, and when my little baby brother screamed and kicked and wanted me to gather flowers instead of reading under the apple-tree, as I was given to doing, I would put up my books and go with him to the brook in the meadow where the little fishes glided in and out from their hiding-places and where the buttercups and daisies grew on the side of the mossy bank. I would be more like my older sister, who had borne with my childish freaks, who always gave me the fairest apple and the largest piece of cake, and who might have stood for Ruth herself.

The story was having a good effect upon me, when suddenly I came upon a little note appended by the author, and which said the whole was a fiction; that no such person as Ruth Lee had ever lived, and I had been reading what was not true. I did not know then that but few of the Sunday school books are literally true, and I was terribly disappointed. I felt that in losing Ruth I had lost a real friend, and, leaning my head against the tree, I cried for a few moments, thinking to myself, that when I was older I would write a book for children, which should every word be _true_. I am older now—much older than I was then; that Sunday afternoon lies far back in the past; the sister, who might have been Ruth, is dead, and her grave is under a little pine, which whispers softly to the wind, of the gentle sleeper below. There are more graves than hers near to the pine. The household is broken up, and children of another name than mine read under the old apple-tree in the orchard, or search for violets and buttercups down by the meadow brook. I have learned to know that stories of fictitious people, if true to life and written with an earnest purpose to do good, may oftentimes be as beneficial as stories of real people; but I have through all adhered to my resolution, that my first story for children should be true; and so this bright May morning, when the sky is beautifully blue, and the grass in the garden is green and fresh with yesterday’s rain, I begin this story of the Font, which shall in every particular be _true_.