The atmosphere and the characters of these Western stories strike us as strangely unreal and exaggerated to-day. In his short story, _The Gunpowder Plot_, Eggleston complained that "whenever one writes with photographic exactness of frontier life he is accused of inventing improbable things." It seems indeed like a world peopled by Dickens, these strange phantasmagoria, "these sharp contrasts of corn-shuckings and camp-meetings, of wild revels followed by wild revivals; these contrasts of highwayman and preacher; this _mélange_ of picturesque simplicity, grotesque humor, and savage ferocity, of abandoned wickedness and austere piety."[61] But grotesque and unreal as it is, it is nevertheless a true picture of the West in which Lincoln spent his boyhood. Every detail and every personage in all the novels had an exact counterpart somewhere in that stirring era. The novelist, however, is not content with a mere graphic picture. He is a philosopher. _The Circuit Rider_, for instance, the most valuable study in the series, brings home to the reader the truth of the author's dictum that "Methodism was to the West what Puritanism was to New England." "In a true picture of this life," he adds, "neither the Indian nor the hunter is the center-piece, but the circuit rider. More than any one else, the early circuit preachers brought order out of this chaos. In no other class was the real heroic element so finely displayed." The figure of the circuit rider as he strides through the book, thundering the "Old Homeric epithets of early Methodism, exploding them like bomb-shells--'you are hair-hung and breeze-shaken over hell,'" has almost an epic quality. "Magruder was a short stout man, with wide shoulders, powerful arms, shaggy brows, and bristling black hair. He read the hymns two lines at a time, and led the singing himself. He prayed with the utmost sincerity, but in a voice that shook the cabin windows and gave the simple people a deeper reverence for the dreadfulness of the preacher's message." It was his business to preach once or twice a day and three times on the Sabbath in a parish that had no western bounds. He talked of nothing but of sin and wrath and judgment to come. His arrival in the settlement cast over everything an atmosphere of awe. He aroused violent antagonisms. The rough element banded together to destroy his influence. They threatened him with death if he entered certain territory, but he never hesitated. He could fight as well as he could pray. They would fall broken and bruised before his savage onslaught and later fall in agony of repentance before his fiery preaching. His sermons came winged with power.