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[Illustration: Cover]




Travelers Five

Along Life's Highway




Works of ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON


The Little Colonel Series

(_Trade Mark, Reg. U. S. Pat. Of._)

Each one vol., large 12mo, cloth, illustrated

  The Little Colonel Stories                            $1.50
    (Containing in one volume the three stories, "The
    Little Colonel," "The Giant Scissors," and "Two
    Little Knights of Kentucky.")
  The Little Colonel's House Party                       1.50
  The Little Colonel's Holidays                          1.50
  The Little Colonel's Hero                              1.50
  The Little Colonel at Boarding-School                  1.50
  The Little Colonel in Arizona                          1.50
  The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation                1.50
  The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor                      1.50
  The Little Colonel's Knight Comes Riding               1.50
  Mary Ware: The Little Colonel's Chum                   1.50
  Mary Ware in Texas                                     1.50

  The above 11 vols., _boxed_ with The Little Colonel's Good
  Times Book, as a set of 12 vols                       18.00

       *       *       *       *       *

  The Little Colonel Good Times Book                     1.50
  The Little Colonel Doll Book                           1.50


Illustrated Holiday Editions

Each one vol., small quarto, cloth, illustrated, and printed in colour

  The Little Colonel                                    $1.25
  The Giant Scissors                                     1.25
  Two Little Knights of Kentucky                         1.25
  Big Brother                                            1.25


Cosy Corner Series

Each one vol., thin 12mo, cloth, illustrated

  The Little Colonel                                     $.50
  The Giant Scissors                                     .50
  Two Little Knights of Kentucky                         .50
  Big Brother                                            .50
  Ole Mammy's Torment                                    .50
  The Story of <DW55>                                      .50
  Cicely                                                 .50
  Aunt 'Liza's Hero                                      .50
  The Quilt that Jack Built                              .50
  Flip's "Islands of Providence"                         .50
  Mildred's Inheritance                                  .50


Other Books

  Joel: A Boy of Galilee                                $1.50
  In the Desert of Waiting                               .50
  The Three Weavers                                      .50
  Keeping Tryst                                          .50
  The Legend of the Bleeding Heart                       .50
  The Rescue of the Princess Winsome                     .50
  The Jester's Sword                                     .50
  Asa Holmes                                             1.00


    L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
    53 Beacon Street        Boston, Mass.

[Illustration: TRAVELERS FIVE ALONG LIFE'S HIGHWAY]





Travelers Five

Along Life's Highway

Jimmy, Gideon Wiggan, The Clown, Wexley Snathers, Bap. Sloan

    BY
    Annie Fellows Johnston

    Author of "The Little Colonel Series," "Asa Holmes,"
    "Joel: A Boy of Galilee," etc.

    With a Foreword by
    Bliss Carman

    Frontispiece in full colour from a painting by
    Edmund H. Garrett

[Illustration: Emblem]

    L. C. Page & Company
    Boston  [Illustration: Flower]    Mdccccxi




    _Copyright, 1901, 1904, by_
    THE SHORTSTORY PUBLISHING COMPANY

    _Copyright, 1899, by_
    THE S. S. MCCLURE CO.

    _Copyright, 1903, by_
    THE CENTURY CO.

    _Copyright, 1911, by_
    L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
    (INCORPORATED)

    _All rights reserved_

    First impression, October, 1911

    _Electrotyped and Printed by
    THE COLONIAL PRESS
    C. H. Simonds & Co., Boston. U. S. A._




Foreword


OF all the elements that go to make up a good story,--plot,
verisimilitude, happy incident, local colour, excellent style,--none
perhaps is more important than the touch of understanding sympathy. The
writer must not only see his characters clearly and draw them with a
masterly hand; he must have the largeness of heart that can share in all
the turbulent experience of the human spirit. His people must be set
against the vast shifting background of destiny. He must show their
dramatic relations, one to another, and the influence of life upon life;
he must also show their profounder, more moving and mysterious,
relations to fate and time and the infinite things.

The writer of fiction creates for us a mimic country, peoples it with
creatures of the fancy, like ourselves and yet different, and asks us to
stray for our entertainment through that new kingdom. The scenes may be
as strange or as familiar as you please; the characters as commonplace
or as exceptional as you will; yet they must always be within the range
of our sympathy. The incidents must be such as we ourselves could pass
through; the people must be such as we can understand. They may well be
exceptional, for that enlists our interest and enlivens our curiosity;
they must not be beyond our comprehension nor outside our spiritual
pale, for then we could have no sympathy with them, and our hearts would
only grow cold as we read.

And what is at the base of our sympathy and interest? Nothing but our
common life. They, too,--all the glad or sorrowing children of
imaginative literature from Helen of Troy to Helena Richie--are
travelers like ourselves on the great highway. We know well how
difficult a road it is, how rough, how steep, how dangerous, how boggy,
how lined with pitfalls, how bordered with gardens of deadly delights,
how beset by bandits, how noisy with fakirs, how overhung with poisonous
fruit and swept by devastating storms. We know also what stretches of
happiness are there, what days of friendship, what hours of love, what
sane enjoyment, what rapturous content.

How should we not, then, be interested in all that goes by upon that
great road? We like to sit at our comfortable windows, when the fire is
alight or the summer air is soft, and "watch the pass," as they say in
Nantucket,--what our neighbours are about, and what strangers are in
town. If we live in a small community, there is the monotony of our
daily routine to be relieved. When an unknown figure passes down the
street, we may enjoy the harmless excitement of novelty and taste
something of the keen savour of adventure. If we are dwellers in a great
city, where every passer is unknown, there is still the discoverer's
zest in larger measure; every moment is great with possibility; every
face in the throng holds its secret; every figure is eloquent of human
drama. The pageant is endless, its story never finished. Who, indeed,
could not be spellbound, beholding that countless changing
tatterdemalion caravan go by? Yet all we may hope for of the inner
history of these journeying beings, so humanly amazing, so significant,
and all moved like ourselves by springs of joy and fear, hope and
discouragement, is a glimpse here and there, a life-story revealed in a
single gesture, a tragic history betrayed in the tone of a voice or the
lifting of a hand, or perhaps a heaven of gladness in a glancing smile.
For the most part their orbits are as aloof from us as the courses of
the stars, potent and mystic manifestations of the divine, glowing
puppets of the eternal masked in a veil of flesh.

This was the pomp of history which held the mind of Shakespeare, of
Dickens, of Cervantes, of Balzac, in thrall, and drew the inquiring eye
of Browning and Whitman, of Stevenson and Borrow, with so charmed and
comprehending a look. To understand and set down faithfully some small
portion of the tale of this ever changing procession, which is for ever
appearing over the sunrise hills of to-m