pular education Indiana owes a great
improvement in the average intelligence of her people. As early as 1880,
I believe, the State had come to rank with some of the New England
States in the matter of literacy.

The folk-speech of the Ohio River country has many features in common
with that of the eastern Middle States, while it received but little
from the dignified eighteenth-century English of eastern Virginia. There
are distinct traces of the North-Irish in the idioms and in the peculiar
pronunciations. One finds also here and there a word from the
"Pennsylvania Dutch," such as "waumus" for a loose jacket, from the
German _wamms_, a doublet, and "smearcase" for cottage cheese, from the
German _schmierkaese_. The only French word left by the old _voyageurs_,
so far as I now remember, is "cordelle," to tow a boat by a rope carried
along the shore.

Substantially the same folk-speech exists wherever the Pennsylvania
migration formed the main element of the primitive settlement. I have
heard the same dialect in the South Carolina uplands that one gets from
a Posey County Hoosier, or rather that one used to get in the old days
before the vandal school-master had reduced the vulgar tongue to the
monotonous propriety of what we call good English.

In drawing some of the subordinate characters in this tale a little too
baldly from the model, I fell into an error common to inexperienced
writers. It is amusing to observe that these portrait characters seem
the least substantial of all the figures in the book. Dr. Small is a
rather unrealistic villain, but I knew him well and respected him in my
boyish heart for a most exemplary Christian of good family at the very
time that, according to testimony afterward given, he was diversifying
his pursuits as a practising physician by leading a gang of burglars.
More than one person has been pointed out as the original of Bud Means,
and I believe there are one or two men each of whom flatters himself
that he posed for the figure of the first disciple of the Church of the
Best Licks. Bud is made up of elements found in some of his race, but
not in any one man. Not dreaming that the story would reach beyond the
small circulation of _Hearth and Home_, I used the names of people in
Switzerland and Decatur counties, in Indiana, almost without being aware
of it. I have heard that a young man bearing the surname given to one of
the rudest families in this book had to suffer many gibes while