ply grateful to these devoted literary pioneers,
whose taste, enterprise and humor were all sorely needed "in our midst."
If not precisely cosmopolitan they were at least in touch with London.

Early in '94 they brought out a lovely edition of _Main Traveled Roads_
and a new book called _Prairie Songs_. Neither of these volumes
sold--the firm had no special facilities for selling books, but their
print and binding delighted me, and in the autumn of the same year I
gladly let them publish a collection of essays called _Crumbling Idols_,
a small screed which aroused an astonishing tumult of comment, mostly
antagonistic. Walter Page, editor of the _Forum_, in which one of the
key-note chapters appeared, told me that over a thousand editorials were
written upon my main thesis.

In truth the attention which this iconoclastic declaration of faith
received at the hands of critics was out of all proportion to its size.
Its explosive power was amazing. As I read it over now, with the clamor
of "Cubism," "Imagism" and "Futurism" in my ears, it seems a harmless
and on the whole rather reasonable plea for National Spirit and the
freedom of youth, but in those days all of my books had mysterious power
for arousing opposition, and most reviews of my work were so savage that
I made a point of not reading them for the reason that they either
embittered me, or were so lacking in discrimination as to have no value.
In spite of all appearances to the contrary, I hated contention,
therefore I left consideration of these assaults entirely to my
publishers. (I learned afterwards that Miss Taft was greatly interested
in _Crumbling Idols_. Perhaps she assumed that I was writing at her.)

Meanwhile in _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_, the manuscript of which I had
carried about with me on many of my lecturing trips, I was attempting to
embody something of Chicago life, a task which I found rather difficult.
After nine years of life in Boston, the city by the lake seemed
depressingly drab and bleak, and my only hope lay in representing it not
as I saw it, but as it appeared to my Wisconsin heroine who came to it
from Madison and who perceived in it the mystery and the beauty which I
had lost. To Rose, fresh from the farm, it was a great capital, and the
lake a majestic sea. As in _A Spoil of Office_, I had tried to maintain
the point of view of a countryman, so now I attempted to embody in _Rose
of Dutcher's Coolly_, a picture of Chicago as an ambiti