movement of this class out of Indiana went on with augmented volume in
the fifties. The emigrants of this period mostly sought the States lying
just west of the Mississippi, and the poorer sort made the trip in
little one-horse wagons of the sorriest description, laden mainly with
white-headed children and followed by the yellow curs that are the one
luxury indispensable to a family of this class. To this migration and to
a liberal provision for popular 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 _schmierkäse_. 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