rendering of our life. But the romantic character of Mr. Harte's
delightful stories and the absence of anything that can justly be called
dialect in them mark them as rather forerunners than beginners of the
prevailing school. For some years after the appearance of the present
novel, my own stories had to themselves the field of provincial realism
(if, indeed, there be any such thing as realism) before there came the
succession of fine productions which have made the last fourteen years
notable.

Though it had often occurred to me to write something in the dialect now
known as Hoosier--the folk-speech of the southern part of Ohio, Indiana,
and Illinois of forty years ago--I had postponed the attempt
indefinitely, probably because the only literary use that had been made
of the allied speech 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