a
student at an Indiana college. I here do public penance for my culpable
indiscretion.

"Jeems Phillips," name and all, is a real person whom at the time of
writing this story I had not seen since I was a lad of nine and he a man
of nearly forty. He was a mere memory to me, and was put into the book
with some slighting remarks which the real Jeems did not deserve. I did
not know that he was living, and it did not seem likely that the story
would have vitality enough to travel all the way to Indiana. But the
portion referring to Phillips was transferred to the county paper
circulating among Jeems' neighbors. For once the good-natured man was,
as they say in Hoosier, "mad," and he threatened to thrash the editor.
"Do you think he means you?" demanded the editor. "To be sure he does,"
said the champion speller. "Can you spell?" "I can spell down any master
that ever came to our district," he replied. As time passed on,
Phillips found himself a lion. Strangers desired an introduction to him
as a notability, and invited the champion to dissipate with them at the
soda fountain in the village drug store. It became a matter of pride
with him that he was the most famous speller in the world. Two years
ago, while visiting the town of my nativity, I met upon the street the
aged Jeems Phillips, whom I had not seen for more than forty years. I
would go far to hear him "spell down" a complacent school-master once
more.

The publication of this book gave rise to an amusing revival of the
spelling-school as a means of public entertainment, not in rustic
regions alone, but in towns also. The furor extended to the great cities
of New York and London, and reached at last to farthest Australia,
spreading to every region in which English is spelled or spoken. But the
effect of the chapter on the spelling-school was temporary and
superficial; the only organization that came from the spelling-school
mania, so far as I know, was an association of proof-readers in London
to discuss mooted points. The sketch of the Church of the Best Licks,
however, seems to have made a deep and enduring impression upon
individuals and to have left some organized results. I myself
endeavored to realize it, and for five years I was the pastor of a
church in Brooklyn, organized on a basis almost as simple as that in the
Flat Creek school-house. The name I rendered into respectable English,
and the Church of the Best Licks became the Church of Christian
Endeav