Stick to the raft by Mrs. George Gladstone
"Stick to the raft" by Mrs. George Gladstone is a religious children''s novel written in the late 19th century. It is a moral tale set along the Saale in Bavaria, following Hans Richter, a woodcutter’s son whose dying father’s counsel—“stick to the raft”—becomes both rafting advice and a Christian motto. Taken in by the toll-master Karl Schmidt at Kösen, Hans faces grief, poverty, workplace trials at the weir, and a simmering rivalry
with the miller’s son Robert and his scheming friend Paul, as faith, honesty, and courage are tested. The opening of the story introduces the Fichtel Mountains, Hans’s devout father and his deathbed charge, and Hans’s move to Kösen to help guide rafts over the weir under the stern-but-kind toll-master, Karl, and his gentle, invalid mother. Hans adopts “Stick to the Raft” as a call to cling to Christ while working the river; he is provoked by Robert and the malicious Paul, briefly loses his temper over a petty prank, and is lovingly corrected. As Hans trains for the town’s shooting festival, a visit to Naumburg’s cherry feast—and a lesson on the martyr John Huss—frame the book’s theme of patient endurance; there Paul secretly injures Hans with a squib, sidelining him from the competition. Robert wins amid guilt, Hans bears his setback with grace, and an elderly sausage-seller who overheard Paul’s plot arrives at the toll-house, intent on setting the wrong right. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Read or download for free
For an overview of the different reading options, see our Reading Guide
| Reading Options | Url | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read now! | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77023.html.images | 174 kB | |||
| EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77023.epub3.images | 1011 kB | |||
| EPUB (older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77023.epub.images | 1013 kB | |||
| EPUB (no images, older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77023.epub.noimages | 121 kB | |||
| Kindle | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77023.kf8.images | 1.0 MB | |||
| older Kindles | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77023.kindle.images | 1.0 MB | |||
| Plain Text UTF-8 | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77023.txt.utf-8 | 160 kB | |||
| Download HTML (zip) | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/77023/pg77023-h.zip | 1.3 MB | |||
| There may be more files related to this item. | |||||
Similar Books
About this eBook
| Author | Gladstone, George, Mrs., 1829-1890 |
|---|---|
| Title | Stick to the raft |
| Original Publication | London: The Religious Tract Society, 1875. |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres |
| Subject | Christian life -- Juvenile fiction |
| Subject | Orphans -- Juvenile fiction |
| Subject | Teenage boys -- Juvenile fiction |
| Subject | Revenge -- Juvenile fiction |
| Subject | Bavaria (Germany) -- Juvenile fiction |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 77023 |
| Release Date | Oct 11, 2025 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 314 downloads in the last 30 days. |
| Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free! | |