Excerpt from The Wistful Years N one of a thousand little towns, with a sunny main street of shops, and diverging avenues with trees and lawns about painted wooden houses, there was a boy - there are a thousand like him - who in summer was usu ally to be seen in the company of a little river. It was a gentle, vagrant stream, like that where Shakespeare was a lad, and it stole up shyly to the very dooryards of the place, and then as noiselessly went on its way again, hid ing for a moment here and there, under the bridges, but flashing out frankly enough um der the open Sky, until lost at last among the meadow farms. David was of the river's mind, precisely, and having once come out of an unknown world to that country village, seemed forever. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.