“The morning wore on without recess. The lessons were heard as usual. As the noon hour drew near, Mrs. Dumont rose from her chair and went into the library. We all felt that something was going to happen. She came out with a copy of Shakespeare, which she opened at about the fifth scene of the fourth act of the second part of King Henry IV. Giving the book to my next neighbor and myself, she bade us read the scene, alternating with the change of the speaker. You remember the famous dialogue in the scene between the dying king and the prince who has prematurely taken the crown from the bedside of the sleeping king. It was all wonderfully fresh to us and to our schoolmates, whose interest was divided between the scene and a curiosity as to the use the teacher meant to make of it. At length the reader who took the king’s part read:-- “‘O, my son! Heaven put it in thy mind to take it hence, That thou mightst win the more thy father’s love, Pleading so wisely in excuse of it.’ Then she took the book and closed it. The application was evident to all, but she made us a touching little speech, full of affection, and afterward restored the recess.”[39] Mrs. Dumont was the first Hoosier to become known beyond the State through imaginative writing. In the little school of story-tellers and poets that flourished in the Ohio Valley in its early history, she was one of the chief figures. It had not then become the fashion to transcribe with fidelity our American local life, and her prose sketches usually reflected nothing of the pioneer times. Her “Life Sketches from Common Paths: A Series of American Tales,” published at New York in 1856, is in the best manner of the day. Western is italicized in the preface of “Ashton Gray,” the novelette which closes the volume, and the author evidently believed that she was making a record of the life that lay about her; but after all, the scene is laid in Ohio and not in Indiana, and a Western atmosphere is not discernible. The hero is the traditional hero of old romance, “whose innate delicacy was refinement, and whose generous impulses, chivalry,” and whose “extreme beauty” was a subject of comment from fair lips. It is not surprising that Annabel, “the dreamy, the impressible, the desolate Annabel,” should have found Ashton “her beau-ideal of the distinctive characteristics of the fearless and self-sustained backwoodsman.... The untamed horse that tosses his mane in the green savannas could scarcely have moved with more freedom; and the perfect development of limb and muscle evidently arose from the conscious vigor and habitual action of one accustomed to tread, not the gay saloon and prescribed walks of fashion, but the rough paths of danger, and the limitless range of voiceless solitudes.” Ashton rescues three children from a burning cabin, using a ladder, in keeping with the