When it came to Miss Crabb's adventure, every humorist excelled himself in descriptive smartness and in cunning turns of ironical phrasing. The head-line experts did telling work in the same connection. All this was perfectly understood and enjoyed at home, but foreigners, especially the English, stubbornly insisted upon viewing it as the high-water mark of American refinement and culture. When that genial periodical, the Smartsburgh _Bulldozer_, announced with due gravity that Miss Crabb, a Western journalist, had leaped from the top of Mt. Boab to the valley below, and had been caught in the arms of a stalwart moonshiner, where she safely reposed, etc., the London _Times_ copied the paragraph and made it a text for a heavy editorial upon the barbaric influences of Republican institutions, to which the American Minister felt bound to advert in a characteristic after-dinner speech at a London club. So humorous, however, were his remarks that he was understood to be vigorously in earnest, and the result was perfect confirmation of the old world's opinion as to the rudimentary character of our national culture. Meantime Hotel Helicon continued to be the scene of varied if not startling incidents. In their search for local color and picturesque material, the litterateurs invaded every nook and corner of the region upon and round about Mt. Boab, sketching, making notes, recording suggestions, studying dialect, and filling their minds with the uncouth peculiarities of the mountain folk. "It has come to this," grumbled Peck, "that American literature, its fiction I mean, is founded on dialect drivel and vulgar yawp. Look at our magazines; four-fifths of their short stories are full of negro talk, or cracker lingo, or mountain jibberish, or New England farm yawp, or Hoosier dialect. It is horribly humiliating. It actually makes foreigners think that we are a nation of green-horns. Why, a day or two ago I had occasion to consult the article on American literature in the Encyclopædia Britannica and therein I was told in one breath how great a writer and how truly American Mr. Lowell is, and in the next breath I was informed that a poem beginning with the verse, 'Under the yaller pines I house' is one of his master-pieces! Do you see? Do you catch the drift of the Englishman's argument? To be truly great, _as an American_, one must be surpassingly vulgar, even in poetry!" This off-hand shower of critical observation had as little effect upon the minds of Peck's hearers as a summer rain has on the backs of a flock of ducks. They even grew more vehement in their pursuit of local color. "When I was spending a month at Rockledge castle with Lord Knownaught," said Crane, "his lordship frequently suggested that I should make a poem on the life of Jesse James." "Well, why didn't you do it?" inquired Miss Crabb with a ring of impatience in her voice, "if you had you might have made a hit. You might have attracted some attention."