Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by Thomas Doughty, Thomas Cole and Robert Seldon Duncanson. The true story of a boy raised in an Indiana poorhouse, sent out to farms as labor, and taught to read by nobody in particular. Byrum wrote for the Gospel Trumpet, the press of the Church of God at Anderson, Indiana, which her husband ran; her speciality was the testimony — the real life told to make a point. Read as a document of what the American poorhouse did to children. Fifty-eight plates of American landscape painting, from Thomas Cole and Winslow Homer among others, follow the waif's story with the woods, lakes, and shorelines of a country he never quite belonged to.