I selected a very modern and unusual type of man as the central
figure of my story. He was highly educated, well born, and carefully
brought up. He possessed all the best elements of a young man in a new
country--intelligent self-dependence, skill, daring, vision. He had an
original turn of mind, and, as men are obliged to do in new countries, he
looked far ahead. Yet he had to face what pioneers and reformers in old
countries have to face, namely the disturbance of rooted interests.
Certainly rooted interests in towns but a generation old cannot be
extensive or remarkable, but if they are associated with habits and
principles, they may be as deadly as those which test the qualities and
wreck the careers of men in towns as old as London. The difference,
however, between the old European town and the new Western town is that
differences in the Western town are more likely to take physical form, as
was the case in the life of Ingolby. In order to accentuate the primitive
and yet highly civilized nature of the life I chose my heroine from a
race and condition more unsettled and more primitive than that of Lebanon
or Manitou at any time. I chose a heroine from the gipsy race, and to
heighten the picture of the primitive life from which she had come I made
her a convert to the settled life of civilization.
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