Eugene's brother, became Fuller's intimate friend.

George Ade, a thin, pale, bright-eyed young Hoosier, was a frequent
visitor at Field's. George had just begun to make a place for himself as
the author of a column in the _News_ called "Stories of the Street and
of the Town"; and John T. McCutcheon, another Hoosier of the same lean
type was his illustrator. I believed in them both and took a kind of
elder brother interest in their work.

In the companionship of men like Field and Browne and Taft, I was happy.
My writing went well, and if I regretted Boston, I had the pleasant
sense of being so near West Salem that I could go to bed in a train at
ten at night, and breakfast with my mother in the morning, and just to
prove that this was true I ran up to the Homestead at Christmas time and
delivered my presents in person--keenly enjoying the smile of delight
with which my mother received them.

West Salem was like a scene on the stage that day--a setting for a rural
mid-winter drama. The men in their gayly-colored Mackinac jackets, the
sleighbells jingling pleasantly along the lanes, the cottage roofs laden
with snow, and the sidewalks, walled with drifts, were almost arctic in
their suggestion, and yet, my parents in the shelter of the friendly
hills, were at peace. The cold was not being driven against them by the
wind of the plain, and a plentiful supply of food and fuel made their
fireside comfortable and secure.

During this vacation I seized the opportunity to go a little farther and
spend a few days in the Pineries which I had never seen. Out of this
experience I gained some beautiful pictures of the snowy forest, and a
suggestion for a story or two. A few days later, on a commission from
_McClure's_, I was in Pittsburg writing an article on "Homestead and Its
Perilous Trades," and the clouds of smoke, the flaming chimneys, the
clang of steel, the roar of blast-furnaces and the thunder of monstrous
steel rollers made Wisconsin lumber camps idyllic. The serene white
peace of West Salem set Pittsburg apart as a sulphurous hell and my
description of it became a passionate indictment of an industrial system
which could so work and so house its men. The grimy hovels in which the
toilers lived made my own homestead a poem. More than ever convinced
that our social order was unjust and impermanent, I sent in my "story,"
in some doubt about its being accepted. It was printed with
illustrations by Orson Lowell and was wi