TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN

INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

THE plan for a group of stories under the fic tion of a company of story-tellers at an inn appears to have visited Mr. Longfellow after he had made some progress with the separate tales. The considerable collection under the title of The Saga of King Olaf was indeed written at first with the design of independent publication. "The thought struck me this morning," writes the poet, February 25, 1859, "that a very good poem might be written on the Saga of King Olaf, who converted the North to Christianity. Read the old Saga in the Heimskringla, Laing's translation. The Chal

lenge of Thor will serve as a prelude." This poem had been written about ten years before as prologue or Introitus to the second part of Christus.

Nearly two years passed before he took up the task in earnest; then, in November, 1860, "with all kinds of interruptions," he says, he wrote fifteen of the lyrics in as many days, and a few days afterward completed the whole of the Saga. Meanwhile he had written and published Paul Revere's Ride in The Atlantic, and before the publication of his volume he had printed in the same magazine one of the lyrics of the Saga and The Legend of Rabbi Ben Levi. Just when he determined upon

the framework of The Wayside Inn does not appear; it is quite possible that he had connected The Saga of King Olaf, which had been lying by for two or three years with his friend Ole Bull, and that the desire to use so picturesque a figure had suggested a group of which the musician should be one. Literature had notable precedents for the general plan of a company at an inn, but whether the actual inn at Sudbury came to localize his conception, or was itself the cause of the plan, is not quite clear. He notes in his diary, October 11, 1862, "Write a little upon the Wayside Inn, a beginning, only"; but an entry for the last day of the same month seems to indicate that he had had the Sudbury inn in his mind and now visited it to give local form and color to his fancy.

October ends with a delicious Indian-summer day. Drive with Fields to the old Red-Horse Tavern in Sudbury, alas, no longer an inn! A lovely valley; the winding road shaded by grand old oaks before the house. A rambling, tumble-down old building, two hundred years old; and till now in the family of the Howes, who have kept an inn for one hundred and seventy-five years. In the old time, it was a house of call for all travellers from Boston westward.

As such, Mr. Longfellow must have made passing acquaintance with the tavern, when in 1826 he made a stage-coach journey from Boston to Albany; he may also well have known the inn in its more recent days through report of his friend Dr. Parsons and Mr. Luigi Monti, who made it a resort for themselves and friends. At any rate his intention was now clear enough, for a few days

after his visit he writes to his companion, Mr. Fields, "The Sudbury Tales go on famously. I have now five complete, with a great part of the Prelude."

The work went on rapidly after this, for with The Saga of King Olaf and other poems on hand, he needed to write but little more to furnish the group he had fashioned with tales enough to represent them. He sent the book to the printer in April, 1863, under the title of The Sudbury Tales, but in August wrote to Mr. Fields: "I am afraid we have made a mistake in calling the new volume The Sudbury Tales. Now that I see it announced I do not like the title. Sumner cries out against it, and has persuaded me, as I think he will you, to come back to The Wayside Inn. Pray think as we do."

The book as originally planned consisted of the first part, and was published November 25, 1863, in an edition of fifteen thousand copies, an indication of the confidence which the publishers had in the poet's popularity.

The disguises of characters were so slight that readers easily recognized most of them at once, and Mr. Longfellow himself never made any mystery of their identity. Just after the publication of the volume he wrote to a correspondent in Eng land:

The Wayside Inn has more foundation in fact than you may suppose. The town of Sudbury is about twenty miles from Cambridge. Some two hundred years ago, an English family, by the name of Howe, built there a country house, which has remained in the