Produced by David Edwards, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project.) Affectionately to my Father, The Reverend GRIGG THOMPSON. HOOSIER MOSAICS. By MAURICE THOMPSON. NEW YORK: E. J. HALE & SON, PUBLISHERS, MURRAY STREET. 1875. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by E. J. HALE & SON, In the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. CONTENTS. PAGE. _WAS SHE A BOY?_ _7_ TROUT'S LUCK, 29 _BIG MEDICINE_, _50_ _THE VENUS OF BALHINCH_, _76_ THE LEGEND OF POTATO CREEK, 92 _STEALING A CONDUCTOR_, _114_ HOIDEN, 127 THE PEDAGOGUE, 162 AN IDYL OF THE ROD, 188 WAS SHE A BOY? No matter what business or what pleasure took me, I once, not long ago, went to Colfax. Whisper it not to each other that I was seeking a foreign appointment through the influence of my fellow Hoosier, the late Vice-President of the United States. O no, I didn't go to the Hon. Schuyler Colfax at all; but I went to Colfax, simply, which is a little dingy town, in Clinton County, that was formerly called Midway, because it is half way between Lafayette and Indianapolis. It was and is a place of some three hundred inhabitants, eking out an aguish subsistence, maintaining a swampy, malarious aspect, keeping up a bilious, nay, an atra-bilious color, the year round, by sucking like an attenuated leech at the junction, or, rather, the crossing of the I. C. & L., and the L. C. & S. W. railroads. It lay mouldering, like something lost and forgotten, slowly rotting in the swamp. I do not mean to attack the inhabitants of Colfax, for they were good people, and deserved a better fate than the eternal rattling the ague took them through from year's end to year's end. Why, they had had the ague so long that they had no respect for it at all. I've seen a woman in Colfax shaking with a chill, spanking a baby that had a chill, and scolding a husband who had a chill, all at once--and I had a dreadful ague on me at the same time! But, as I have said, they were good people, and I suppose they are still. They go quietly about the usual business of dead towns. They have "stores" in which they offer for sale calico, of the big-figured, orange and red sort, surprisingly cheap. They smoke those little Cuba sixes at a half cent apiece, and call them cigars; they hang round the dépôt, and trade jack-knives and lottery watches on the afternoons of lazy Sundays; they make harmless sport of the incoming and outgoing country folk; and, in a word, keep pretty busy at one thing or another, and above all--they shake.