The Schoolmasters Stories — Edward Eggleston

A collection of stories that a former schoolmaster used to tell boys and girls over the years, many of them intended for publication earlier but destroyed by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871—books, stereotype plates, and all as the author describes it in his preface. They were finally rewritten, resubmitted, and published as The Schoolmaster's Stories in 1874. Some of the stories are adventure stories intended for boys, some of them are queer little improbable, unbelievable, half-fairy-story sort of things intended more for girls, but almost all of them have morals which is always a good thing in stories meant for youngsters; and not totally unexpected since Edward Eggleston (December 10, 1837–September 3, 1902) was a Methodist minister in addition to being a schoolmaster, historian, and novelist. Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing. We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison. Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book. While remaining faithful to a writer's original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes. If the printer became distracted after placing an 'a' at the end of a line and then placed another 'a' at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too? Not us. That's why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.