The rural type in Indiana has found notable interpretation at the hands of two writers who, working independently of each other and at different periods, have made records of great social and literary value and interest. As already indicated, country life at the West and Southwest has not varied widely in different communities. The same social conditions and peculiarities of speech have been observable in many regions deriving population from common sources; but the type found in the Ohio Valley was best defined in Indiana, and it has gained its greatest fame through the interpretations of Edward Eggleston and James Whitcomb Riley. Their outlook on life has been wholly different, and their literary methods have been antipodal; but they have both been keen observers of the rural Indianians, though of different generations. They meet in a strong affection for their native soil, and in an appreciation of the essential domesticity and moral enlightenment of the people they depict. I. _Edward Eggleston_ Switzerland County lies in the far southeastern corner of the State, and Vevay, its principal town and capital, is on the Ohio River. The name of the county is explained by the fact of its settlement by Swiss immigrants, who were drawn thither by the supposed adaptability of the soil to the growth of the grape. Vevay lies about midway between Louisville and Cincinnati, and the steamboats plying between these two cities are its only medium of communication with the world, as no railway touches it. It was to this pretty village that Joseph Cary Eggleston, the father of Edward and George Cary Eggleston, came in 1832. The impression has been abroad that the author of “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” was himself reared amid the squalor and ignorance which he described so vividly, but this is without foundation of fact. The Egglestons were of good Virginia stock, and the members of the Indiana branch of the family were cultivated people. Joseph Cary was graduated from William and Mary College in his seventeenth year with high honors. He had studied law before he left Virginia, and the fourteen years of his life that remained to him after his removal to Indiana were spent in the successful practice of his profession. He was, moreover, popular in the community, for he sat in both branches of the General Assembly, and was nominated for representative in Congress, but failed of election. He married, soon after reaching Indiana, the daughter of George Craig, of Craig township, in Switzerland County. The Craigs were of a distinguished Kentucky family, and, like the Egglestons, looked back to a Virginia ancestry. Edward Eggleston was born at Vevay in 1837, and has never failed to speak with great cordiality and affection of the pretty river town whose chief distinction lies in his own attainments. He has even taken occasion in recent years[41] to rebuke “a certain condescension in New Englanders,” which had prompted the