of the Southwest had been in the books of the
primitive humorists of that region. I found it hard to dissociate in my
own mind the dialect from the somewhat coarse boisterousness which
seemed inseparable from it in the works of these rollicking writers. It
chanced that in 1871 Taine's lectures on "Art in the Netherlands," or
rather Mr. John Durand's translation of them, fell into my hands as a
book for editorial review. These discourses are little else than an
elucidation of the thesis that the artist of originality will work
courageously with the materials he finds in his own environment. In
Taine's view, all life has matter for the artist, if only he have eyes
to see.

Many years previous to the time of which I am now speaking, while I was
yet a young man, I had projected a lecture on the Hoosier folk-speech,
and had even printed during the war a little political skit in that
dialect in a St. Paul paper. So far as I know, nothing else had ever
been printed in the Hoosier. Under the spur of Taine's argument, I now
proceeded to write a short story wholly in the dialect spoken in my
childhood by rustics on the north side of the Ohio River. This tale I
called "The Hoosier School-Master." It consisted almost entirely of an
autobiographical narration in dialect by Mirandy Means of the incidents
that form the groundwork of the present story. I was the newly
installed editor of a weekly journal, _Hearth and Home_, and I sent this
little story in a new dialect to my printer. It chanced that one of the
proprietors of the paper saw a part of it in proof. He urged me to take
it back and make a longer story out of the materials, and he expressed
great confidence in the success of such a story. Yielding to his
suggestion, I began to write this novel from week to week as it appeared
in the paper, and thus found myself involved in the career of a
novelist, which had up to that time formed no part of my plan of life.
In my inexperience I worked at a white-heat, completing the book in ten
weeks. Long before these weeks of eager toil were over, it was a
question among my friends whether the novel might not write _finis_ to
me before I should see the end of it.

The sole purpose I had in view at first was the resuscitation of the
dead-and-alive newspaper of which I had ventured to take charge. One of
the firm of publishers thought much less favorably of my story than his
partner did. I was called into the private office and informed wi