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Freckles is a novel written by the American writer and naturalist Gene Stratton-Porter. It is primarily set in the Limberlost Swamp area of Indiana, with brief scenes set in Chicago. The title character also appears briefly in Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost.

The hero is an adult orphan, described as a "plucky waif", who has been raised since infancy in a Chicago orphanage and yet speaks with a powerful Irish accent. He applies for a job guarding timber in the swamp, and is accepted despite his youth and the disability of having only one hand. He gives his name only as "Freckles", insisting that he has no name of his own, and that the name given him in the orphanage (which we never learn) "is no more my name than it is yours".

He develops an interest in the wildlife of the swamp and in natural history, and falls in love with a girl who is never given any other name than "the Swamp Angel". The story's primary action involves his self-education, his loyalty to his employer, his growing love for the Angel (and hers for him), his -- and everyone else's -- conviction that it's better and finer to deny his love and make them both unhappy than to court her "without knowledge of honorable birth", and the unquestioned certainty that he must be unworthy of love because of his apparent bastardy and because his birth-parents apparently abused him. Eventually it's determined that he is in fact worthy to love the Angel and to be loved by her -- not because he is himself a good, decent, upstanding, self-sacrificing human being, but because his parents were upright and probably well-to-do people, and because he comes from "a race of men that have been gentlemen for ages, and couldn't be anything else".

• Online text of Freckles at Project Gutenberg

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