In Sailing On The Ice And Other Stories From The Old Squire's Farm C. A. Stephens' much loved stories are revived. In much the same way that Mark Twain defined boyhood on the Mississippi River, Charles Asbury Stephens chronicled childhood in late-19th century New England. This master storyteller, published more than twenty-five hundred stories contributing more than fifteen hundred to The Youth's Companion, the most widely read family magazine in America at the time. These "wonderfully quaint stories of C. A. Stephens work a kind of magic," and they "are tales readers should savor. There simply aren't many like them," says the Journal Inquirer.
This new collection of twenty-eight stories follows on the heels of the critically-acclaimed anthology Stories From The Old Squire's Farm. It centers around six children orphaned by the Civil War and being raised on their grandparent's farm in rural Maine. It reminds us how storytellers such as Stephens are the true historians, for they are the preservers of emotion, the documentarians of feeling. "Nobody does the late-19th century on the ground better, more gently or with a lighter hand than Stephens," says the Courier-Gazette. With the works of C. A. Stephens still entertaining the young and the young at heart, we can rest assured that the memories and the wisdom of a gentler time will always be around to comfort and teach us.
