When the author of such aphorisms undertook to write another anthology about another town he naturally avoided the mystical elevation of Spoon River as well as its verse; he used the irony of a disillusioned man and the directness of a bullet. His scheme was not to assemble epitaphs for the dead of the village but to tell crisp anecdotes of the living. He had no iniquities in the human order to assail, since he believes that the order is just and that it rarely hurts any one who does not deserve to be hurt by reason of some avoidable imbecility. He made no specialty of scandal; he did not inquire curiously into the byways of sex; he let pathology alone. He appears in the book to be--as he is in the flesh--a wise old man letting his memory run through the town and recalling bits of decent, illuminating gossip. He is willing to tell a fantastic yarn with a dry face or to tuck a tragedy in a sentence; to repeat some village legend in his own low tones or to puncture some village bubble with a cynical inquiry. Yet for all his acceptance and tolerance of the village he is far from helping to continue the sentimental traditions concerning it. The common sense which he considers the basis of all philosophy--"If it isn't common sense, it isn't philosophy"--he has the gift of expounding in a language which is piercingly individual. It strips his village of trivial local color and reduces it to the simplest terms--making it out a more or less fortuitous congregation of human beings of whom some work and some play, some behave themselves and some do not, some consequently prosper and some fail, some are happy and some are miserable. His village is not dainty, like a poem, for the reason that he believes no village ever was; at least he has never seen one like that. Downrightness like his is death to mere pretty notions about tribes and towns quite as truly as are the positive indictments brought against them by Mr. Masters and Mr. Anderson. If Mr. Howe is less vivid than those two, because he distrusts passion and poetry, he is also quieter and surer. "I am not an Agnostic; I _know_.... I have lived a long time, and my real problems have always been simple." _Sinclair Lewis_ _Spoon River Anthology_ was a collection of poems, _Winesburg, Ohio_ was a collection of short stories, _The Anthology of Another Town_ was a collection of anecdotes. It remained for a novel in the customary form, Sinclair Lewis's _Main Street_, to bring to hundreds of thousands the protest against the village which these books brought to thousands.