Dr. Eggleston’s life makes in itself a delightful story of aspiration and achievement. Many Americans have experienced hardship and discouragement, but few have profited so richly as this novelist and historian by every whim of fortune. Ill health has menaced him all his days, but physical infirmity has never conquered his ambition or diminished his mental vitality. There is about him an exuberance of spirits that is not only a distinguishing personal trait, but a quality of all his stories. And if ill health in his youth and young manhood interrupted the orderly course of education, it also brought him opportunities for acquiring a broad knowledge of American provincial life that no school could have given him. When Dr. Eggleston began to write there was, outside of New England, little local literature, and the value of dialect in interpretative fiction was only beginning to be understood. Cable, Page, Harris, Murfree, “Octave Thanet,” were names unknown to the catalogues when “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” appeared. Mark Twain and Bret Harte were well embarked upon their careers; but the one was a humorist and the other a romanticist, and neither had undertaken to reproduce local speech accurately. Dr. Eggleston was the pioneer provincial realist; and if, as he says, the great American novel is being written in sections, he certainly contributed early chapters, and indicated the lines to be followed. His marriage, in 1891, to Frances E. Goode, a granddaughter of his father’s cousin, Judge Miles Cary Eggleston, renewed ties with Indiana that had never been wholly broken during long years of absence. He has often been a visitor to Madison, which was Mrs. Eggleston’s home, and he spent the winter of 1899 in that beautiful and tranquil town. II. _James Whitcomb Riley_