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 with some
severity that my characters were too rough to be presentable in a paper
so refined as ours. I confess they did seem somewhat too robust for a
sheet so anæmic as _Hearth and Home_ had been in the months just
preceding. But when, the very next week after this protest was made, the
circulation of the paper increased some thousands at a bound, my
employer's critical estimate of the work underwent a rapid change--a
change based on what seemed to him better than merely literary
considerations. By the time the story closed, at the end of fourteen