The newspaper of largest circulation in this region was the _Blade_ of Toledo, which he read assiduously. The mother and daughter-in-law did most of the work. The mother was forever busy cooking breakfast or dinner, cleaning the rooms, milking, making butter and cheese, gathering eggs from a nearby hennery. Her large cellar was stocked with jellies, preserved fruit, apples, potatoes and other vegetables. There was an ample store of bacon, salt pork and beef. I found that no fresh meat other than chicken was served, but the meals were delightful and plentiful, delicious biscuits and jelly, fresh butter, eggs, ham, bacon, salt pork or cured beef, and the rarely absent fried chicken, as well as some rabbits which Mich shot. During my stay he did nothing but idle about the barn, practicing on a cornet which he said had saved his lungs at a time when he was threatened with consumption. But his playing! I wonder the cure did not prove fatal. I noted the intense interest of Mich’s father in what the discovery of gas in this region would do for it. He was almost certain that all small towns hereabout would now become prosperous manufacturing centers. There would be work for all. Wages would go up. Many people would soon come here and become rich. This of course never came true at all. The flow of natural gas soon gave out and the oil strikes were not even rivals of some nearby fields. All this talk was alien to my thoughts. I could not fix my interest on trade and what it held in store for anybody. I knew it must be so and that America was destined to grow materially, but somehow the thing did not interest me. My thoughts leaped to the artistic spectacle such material prosperity might subsequently present, not to the purely material phase of the prosperity itself. Indeed I could never think of the work being done in any factory or institution without passing from that work to the lives behind it, the crowds of commonplace workers, the great streets which they filled, the bare homes, and the separate and distinct dramas of their individual lives. I was tremendously interested by the rise of various captains of industry then already bestriding America, their opportunities and pleasures, the ease and skill with which they organized “trusts” and combinations, their manipulations of the great railroads, oil and coal fields, their control of the telegraph and the telephone, their sharp and watchful domination of American politics; but only as drama. Grover Cleveland was President, and his every deed was paining the Republicans quite as much as it was gratifying the Democrats, but I could already see that the lot of the underdog varied little with the much-heralded changes of administration—and it was the underdog that always interested me more than the upper one, his needs, his woes, his simplicities. Here, as elsewhere, I could see by talking to Mich and his father, men became vastly excited, paraded and all but wept over the results of one