Just finished a book I checked out at the library 2 days ago. It was 351 pages long, so that means I REALLY liked it!
The Penobscot Man, by Fannie Hardy Eckstorm. It was first published in 1904. This was my review on Goodreads...
I loved this book! The stories in it are true and are about real men. It was more than interesting to read about Joe Attien, Thoreau's guide on his second trip to the Maine woods, who drowned trying to run impossible rapids, just for the challenge of it. He could have saved himself, but chose to stay with those of his men who could not swim. "Oh, the folly of all self-sacrifice, the vanity of all things beautiful, the lying promise of spiritual ends which the cynic preaches! 'This might have been sold for much and given to the poor!' Verily. Yet when the poor had eaten and drunken it, what then? But the precious wastefulness, preserved within a book, — how many are fed from the ambrosia of such a fair and noble deed!"
And then there is the pretty story of "The Posies", where eleven pure white Ladies Slippers are plucked and saved by the rivermen, because they overheard a woman telling her companion that they were beautiful! Those rough men, who would dare each other to do deeds that often cost them their lives, yet took such care not to crush a little bird's nest that had been built close to the river where they worked! I doubt there will be men like them ever again.
