Excerpt from Eben Holden: A Tale of the North Country This book has grown out of such enforced leisure as one may find in a busy life. Chap ters begun in the publicity of a Pullman car have been finished in the cheerless solitude of a hotel chamber. Some have had their begin ning in a sleepless night and their end in a day of bronchitis. A certain pious farmer in the north country when, like Agricola, he was about to die, requested the doubtful glory of this epitaph: He was a poor sinner, but he done his best. Save for the fact that I am an excellent sinner, in a literary sense, the words may stand for all the apology I have to make. The characters were mostly men and women I have known and who left with me a love of my kind that even a wide experience with knavery and misfortune has never dissipated. 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.