The successor of Carleton is James Whitcomb Riley of Indiana, the leading producer during the later period of platform and newspaper balladry. The early life of Riley was urban rather than rural. His father was a lawyer at Greenfield, a typical Western county seat, and after sending the boy to the village school he sought to turn him to his own profession. But there was a stratum of the wayward and the unconventional in Riley even from the first. The professions and the ordinary occupations open to youth did not appeal to the imaginative lad. He learned the trade of sign-painting and then for a year traveled with a patent medicine "doctor" as advertising agent. Following this picturesque experience came three or four years as a traveling entertainer with a congenial troupe, then desultory newspaper work, and finally, from 1877 to 1885, a steady position on the Indianapolis _Journal_. His recognition as a poet came in the mid eighties, and following it came a long period on the lecture circuit, reading his own productions, at one time working in conjunction with Eugene Field and Edgar W. Nye,--"Bill Nye." His earliest work seems to have been declamatory and journalistic in origin. "I was always trying to write of the kind of people I knew and especially to write verse that I could read just as if it were being spoken for the first time." And again, "I always took naturally to anything theatrical."[141] For years the newspaper was his only medium. He contributed to most of the Indiana journals with pseudonyms ranging all the way from "Edyrn" to "Jay Whitt" and "Benjamin F. Johnson of Boone," and it was while writing under the last of these for the Indianapolis _Journal_ that he first became known beyond the confines of Indiana. The device of printing poems that ostensibly were contributed by a crude farmer from a back country was not particularly original. Lowell had used it and Artemus Ward. Moreover, the fiction of accompanying these poems with editorial comment and specimen letters from the author was as old at least as _The Biglow Papers_, but there was a Western, Pike County freshness about the Benjamin F. Johnson material. The first poem in the series, for instance, was accompanied by material like this: Mr. Johnson thoughtfully informs us that he is "no edjucated man," but that he has, "from childhood up tel old enugh to vote, allus wrote more or less poetry, as many of an albun in the neghborhood can testify." Again, he says that he writes "from the hart out"; and there is a touch of genuine pathos in the frank avowal, "Thare is times when I write the tears rolls down my cheeks."