Rereading a collection of Andrea Barrett’s short stories reminded me of her interest in Saranac Lake and also encouraged me to visit an Adirondack classic from the 19th century.

Readers are likely familiar with Barrett’s novel, “The Air We Breathe,” set in Saranac Lake during its early years as a restorative destination for tuberculosis patients. In her 2002 short story collection, “Servants of the Map,” all of the stories are fine, and Barrett’s “The Cure” is a precursor to that novel with its local setting five years later.

“The Cure” tells the story of Nora Kynd, who like so many others leave starving Ireland in the 1840s and sail up the St. Lawrence, where she is quarantined at Grosse Isle, the inspection station east of Quebec City. Authorities at Grosse Isle do not expect Nora to live and send her younger and healthier brothers on to who knows where. But Nora survives her stay at Grosse Isle and in 1848 finds her way to Detroit, where she works as a nurse and later marries a man who does not return from the American Civil War.

Since she left Ireland, Nora lost her parents, her two brothers and her husband. While working in Detroit, her emptiness and loneliness constantly lead her to wonder about the fate of her brothers, Ned and Denis.

Working the night shift at the local hospital with the wounded and damaged Civil War veterans, Nora befriends a patient who reads a travel book about the Adirondacks. And in that book Nora sees pamphlets advertising hotels in the Adirondacks, including the Northview Inn, owned by Ned Kynd. She has found one of her brothers.

The second half of “The Cure” details Nora’s journey to and reunion with her brother in Saranac Lake, and her role as a nurse to the TB patients who are beginning to flock to the north woods for a cure.

The dynamic between Nora and Ned is the heart of the story. They represent two responses to painful personal histories. Nora wants to share hers, but Ned wants to bury his.

Their separation at Grosse Isle haunted Nora. “I was 23 when I got to Detroit. … I missed you and Denis the way I’d miss my legs,”she tells Ned. And so, having found one of the two brothers, she is anxious to tell Ned of her life.

Ned, however, was sure Nora had died at Grosse Isle, and finds memories of the past painful and best forgotten: “I thought you were dead I wasn’t trying to remember, mostly I was trying to forget.”

The cure of “The Cure” is not about tuberculosis. The cure is family and work – in a village where Ned, after a hard, wandering life that included a winter on a ship frozen in the arctic, found some peace. And Nora discovered, with him and in her caring for patients, “she might, for all that gets lost in this life, at last have found a cure.”

The travel book the Civil War veteran in the Detroit hospital had read, which brought Nora to Saranac Lake, was, of course, William Henry Harrison Murray’s 1869″Adventures in the Wilderness.” Murray was a Yale graduate, a clergyman and a lover of nature – especially the Adirondacks. If you read about this area’s history as a destination, Murray surfaces again and again. His book influenced many travelers, often called “Murray’s Fools,” to take trains and boats and stage coaches to the mountains. For readers today, it provides an early discussion of the recreational treasures of the area.

Murray wrote rapturously of what he found in the woods: “The nights I have passed in the woods! How they haunt me with their sweet suggestive memories of silence and repose.” And for those who were encouraged by his experience, he offered suggestions about how to get to the mountains, how much a month there would cost ($125), and some cautions about the quality of Adirondack guides. Not all were excellent – some were ignorant, some lazy, some low-bred.

(While Murray warns about Adirondackers, Ned has his own thoughts about the people he serves at his lodge: “But I wouldn’t work for most of them if we didn’t need the money. They’re too noisy. Too busy. Too rich.”)

Barrett’s fiction and Murray’s travel guide are both rewarding for what they say about the area we call home.