This was one of the first books that Mayne Reid wrote. Its action takes place in a central part of North America, designated a Desert. Some people set out to travel in this central desert, when they somewhat lose their way. Luckily they eventually spot the light of a farm-house, where they knock and receive hospitality.

Their kind host and his family then explain to them how they came to live where they do, and what a lovely place it is. Reid is very knowledgeable about animals and also plants. Much of the rest of the book is taken up with tales of encounters with various animals, and with stories of the uses of many trees and shrubs.

It is written in an unusual style, but in fact, because of the shortness of the chapters, it can hold the reader's attention very well.

As with several other books by this author it had been very badly typeset, apparently using old and damaged type. This made the OCRed version of the text come out very full of misreads, but it was fun tidying this up. Apologies if any more misreads come to light.

REID, Thomas Mayne (1818-83).

Irish writer of boys' stories, born in Ballyroney, County Down. In 1840 he emigrated to New Orleans, settled as a journalist in Philadelphia (1843), and served in the US army during the Mexican war (1847), where he was severely wounded. Returning to Britain in 1849, he settled down to a literary life in London. His vigorous style and hairbreadth escapes delighted his readers. Among his books, many of which were popular in translation in Poland and Russia, were The Rifle Rangers (1850), Scalp Hunters (1851), Boy Hunters (1853), War Trail (1851), Boy Tar (1859), and Headless Horseman (1866). He went back to New York in 1867 and founded the Onward Magazine, but returned to England in 1870.

(With acknowledgements to Chambers Biographical Dictionary)

The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature mentions that he was the son of a Presbyterian Minister, and that the first two books mentioned above were for a general readership. When he returned to England the publisher Davis Bogue suggested that he should write books specifically for boys, catering for the Christmas market each year. He was a naturalist, and wrote about the creations of Nature, where many other Victorian authors would have been all moralising and pious. He was a great admirer of Byron, and some of his heroes are Byronic in temperament.

A PDF of scans and an HTML version of this book are provided. We also provide a plain TEXT version and full instructions for using this to make your own audiobook. To find these click on the PDF, HTML or TXT links on the left.

These transcriptions of books by various nineteenth century authors of instructive books for teenagers, were made during the period 1997 to the present day by Athelstane e-Books. Most of the books are concerned with the sea, but in any case all will give a good idea of life in the nineteenth century. This of course includes attitudes prevalent at the time, but frowned upon nowadays.

We used a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner to scan the pages. We then made a pdf which we used to assist with editing the OCRed text.

To make a text version we used ABBYY Finereader 8 to produce a first draft of the text, and Athelstane software to find misreads and improve the text. We proof-read the chapters, and then made a CD with the book read aloud by either Fonix ISpeak or TextAloud MP3. The last step enables us to hear and correct most of the errors that may have been missed by the other steps, as well as entertaining us during the work of transcription.

The resulting text can be read at www.athelstane.co.uk