Excerpt from The Village of Merrow: Its Past and Present Sir, - In inscribing to you the accompanying narrative, I have been guided, mainly, by the high opinion which I have ever entertained of your unremitting exertions in the diffusion of profitable knowledge. I can recall the day when the earliest of your publications for the people made its appearance. I was then in my twenty-first year, with Leith Walk and its surroundings as familiar, perhaps, to me as to yourself, which not a little enhanced the interest that I took in your adventure. From then to the present time, no observer can have failed to notice, and no candid mind but will acknowledge the giant share which it and its successors have had, not only in cultivating the taste of the public, but in awakening in those for whom they were more especially intended an ambition for still higher attainments. Although the English agricultural labourer, in whose behalf the following pages have been written, can hardly, in the comparative darkness that still begirts him, be said to have been more than reached by your endeavours, you have been instrumental, and more so than any one I could name, by quickening the sympathy of those better circumstanced, in furnishing him, and when most needed, with friends and upholders. It would, indeed, be disheartening to suppose that labours, so fruitful elsewhere, had in one direction been entirely barren. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.

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