He was responsible for much; though he was actively to blame for nothing. Moreover he and his career were interesting.

So he merits a word or two, if only to explain what happened before the rise of our story’s curtain.

At this point, the boreful word, Prologue, should be writ large, with a space above and[10] below it, by way of warning. But that would be the sign to skip. And one cannot skip this short prologue without losing completely the tangled thread of the yarn which follows—a thread worth gripping and a yarn more or less worth telling.

[10]

So let us dispose of the prologue, without calling it by its baleful name; and in a mere mouthful or two of words. Something like this:

When Osmun Vail left his father’s Berkshire farm, at twenty-one, to seek his fortune in New York, he wore his $12 “freedom suit” and had a cash capital of $18, besides his railway ticket.

Followed forty years of brow-sweat and brain-wrack and one of those careers whose semi-occasional real-life recurrence keeps the Success magazines out of the pure-fiction class.

When Osmun Vail came back, at sixty-one, to the Berkshire farm that had been his father’s until the mortgage was foreclosed, he was worth something more than five million dollars. His life-battle had been fought and won. His tired soul yearned unspeakably for the peace and loveliness of the pleasant hill country where he had been born—the homeland he had half-forgotten and which had wholly forgotten him and his.

Osmun recalled the prim village of Stockbridge,[11] the primmer town of Pittsfield, drowsing beneath South Mountain, the provincial scatter of old houses known as Lenox; the tumbled miles of mountain wilderness and the waste of lush farmland between and around them.

[11]

At sixty-one he found Pittsfield a new city; and saw a Lenox and Stockbridge that had been discovered and renovated by beauty-lovers from the distant outside world. All that region was still in the youth of its golden development. But the wave had set in, and had set in strong.

A bit dazzled and more than a little troubled by the transformation, Osmun Vail sought the farm of his birth and the nearby village of Aura. Here at least nothing had changed; except that his father’s house—built by his grandfather’s own gnarled hands—had burned down; taking the rattle-trap red barns with it. The whole 

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