ence with speculation for its own sake: "There are no mysteries.
Where does the wind come from? It doesn't matter: we know the habits of
wind after it arrives." As to politics: "The people are always worsted
in an election." As to altruism: "The long and the short of it is,
whoever catches the fool first is entitled to shear him." As to love:
"We cannot permit love to run riot; we must build fences around it, as
we do around pigs." As to money: "In theory, it is not respectable to be
rich. In fact, poverty is a disgrace." As to literature: "Poets are
prophets whose prophesying never comes true." As to prudence: "Trying to
live a spiritual life in a material world is the greatest folly I know
anything about." As to persistent hopefulness: "Pessimism is always
nearer the truth than optimism."

When the author of such aphorisms undertook to write another anthology
about another town he naturally avoided the mystical elevation of Spoon
River as well as its verse; he used the irony of a disillusioned man and
the directness of a bullet. His scheme was not to assemble epitaphs for
the dead of the village but to tell crisp anecdotes of the living. He
had no iniquities in the human order to assail, since he believes that
the order is just and that it rarely hurts any one who does not deserve
to be hurt by reason of some avoidable imbecility. He made no specialty
of scandal; he did not inquire curiously into the byways of sex; he let
pathology alone. He appears in the book to be--as he is in the flesh--a
wise old man letting his memory run through the town and recalling bits
of decent, illuminating gossip. He is willing to tell a fantastic yarn
with a dry face or to tuck a tragedy in a sentence; to repeat some
village legend in his own low tones or to puncture some village bubble
with a cynical inquiry.

Yet for all his acceptance and tolerance of the village he is far from
helping to continue the sentimental traditions concerning it. The common
sense which he considers the basis of all philosophy--"If it isn't
common sense, it isn't philosophy"--he has the gift of expounding in a
language which is piercingly individual. It strips his village of
trivial local color and reduces it to the simplest terms--making it out
a more or less fortuitous congregation of human beings of whom some work
and some play, some behave themselves and some do not, some consequently
prosper and some fail, some are happy and some are miserable. His
vill