polis is that Indianapolis is full of a
modified variety of these houses which is even more characteristically
American--to my mind--than the Cambridge style itself. Indianapolis
being by general consent the present chief center of letters in the
United States, it is not surprising that I, an author, knew more people
from Indianapolis than from any other city. Indeed, I went to
Indianapolis simply because I had old friends there, and not at all in
the hope of inspecting a city characteristically American. It was quite
startlingly different from the mental picture I had formed of it.

I think that in order to savor Indianapolis properly one should approach
it as I approached it--in an accommodation-train on a single track, a
train with a happy-go-lucky but still agreeable service in its
restaurant-car, a train that halts at every barn-door in the vast flat,
featureless fields of yellow stubble, rolling sometimes over a muddy,
brown river, and skirting now and then a welcome wooded cleft in the
monotony of the landscape. The scenes at those barn-doors were full of
the picturesque and of the racy. A farmer with a gun and a brace of
rabbits and a dog leaping up at them, while two young women talked to or
at the farmer from a distance; a fat little German girl in a Scotch
frock, cleaning outside windows with the absorbed seriousness of a
grandmother; a group of boys dividing their attention between her and
the train; an old woman driving a cart, and a negro gesticulating and
running after the cart; and all of them, save the nigger, wearing
gloves--presumably as a protection against the strong wind that swept
through the stubble and shook the houses and the few trees. Those
houses, in all their summariness and primitive crudity, yet reminded one
of the Cambridge homes; they exhibited some remains of the
pre-Revolution style.

And then you come to the inevitable State Fair grounds, and the environs
of the city which is the capital and heart of all those plains.

And after you have got away from the railroad station and the imposing
hotels and the public monuments and the high central buildings--an
affair of five minutes in an automobile--you discover yourself in long,
calm streets of essential America. These streets are rectangular; the
streets of Cambridge abhor the straight line. They are full everywhere
of maple-trees. And on either side they are bordered with homes--each
house detached, each house in its own fairly spaci