Book excerpt: THE stories of the smallest, the least important, the most favored by fate of the United States of the New World, are well worth the telling. It may therefore be wondered that those of Maine - historically the beginning of New England, the scene of the bloodiest Indian wars, the place where different European nations contended most fiercely for supremacy, and whose records are so dramatic that they read like folklore and legend rather than veritable history - should have been so little told. Many of those that have been told are to be found in histories that are out of print and forgotten, and in the musty folios of the historical societies, where the young people, at least, seldom look. Some not yet, and perhaps never to be read, have been written by glaciers and fossil remains on rocky headlands and in obscure caves. In remote graveyards strange foreign names and inscriptions hint of others.