DRUID A A NOVEL "A fine piece of original work...The scene of the story is the typical prairie farming community of the Middle West. Mr. Frederick is going to be known far and wide as a novelist of extraordinary power and insight." -LLEWELYN JONES in The Chicago Evening Post. COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INO. MIA OL Published, March, 1924 AIMBORLIAD Set up, printed and bound by the Vail-Ballou Press, Inc., Binghamton, N. Y. MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PREFATORY NOTE To the reader of this volume who is not acquainted with The Midland, a word of comment in regard to that magazine may be acceptable. The Midland was founded in 1915 in the hope that it might encourage sincere and competent writers, especially in the middle west, by giving them a hearing too often denied in the existing magazines. It was not conceived as a commercial undertaking, but as an adventure in publishing, for its own sake, work which had been written for its own sake. It has paid no salaries or profits, and has made no payment for contributions. Its writers and its editors have worked in comparative freedom, unhampered by any purpose of attracting large circulation or by any necessity of conciliating advertisers. In their choice of stories for publication in the magazine the editors have always tried to apply, rather than any standard of popular taste or any academic rule of thumb, the canons of the art of story writing itself. It has been a difficult task to select from the files of nine annual volumes a group of stories so small as the present collection which should yet represent the full range of the work published in The Midland. Probably any regular reader of the magazine will miss from this volume some stories which he would have chosen, and hence will be no more wholly satisfied than is the editor himself of the stories which I selected as probably the 668076 |