Author's Foreword

To My Dear Friend E. PRENTISS BAILEY

This is a tale of youth—of its loves and dreams and hazards, and of the incredible riches of purity which often belong to it.

Many of the adventures which led to the Hand-Made Gentleman and the shop at Rushwater are from the author’s own experience. Pearl is a composite of Davenport (the country blacksmith who invented an electric motor in 1833) and of a certain modest veteran of northern New York.

It tells how steam-power chose its first long pathway and began its swift errands from the Atlantic to the middle continent; how the roar and rush of the water-floods betrayed their secret and suggested the coming of great things; how “the horses of the river” began to tread the turbine and yield their power to man; how the spirit of new enterprise contended with conservatism, ignorance, and greed in the capitals, and how, thereby, evils developed which we are now striving to correct.

For its background of railroad and political history the author is indebted to many forgotten records, and to his friends A. Barton Hepburn, William C. Hudson, Arthur D. Chandler, and Mark D. Wilber, an honored Assemblyman in the sessions of 1865, 1866, and 1867, and later United States District Attorney. For the color of the day in Pittsburg, at the close of the war, he is under obligation to Mr. Andrew Carnegie; for that of Black Friday, to Mr. Thomas A. Edison.

The author has held to no strict observance of the unity of place, the work of his characters being that of turning the State into one neighborhood.