_resignated_ (resigned), _artificialer_ (more artificial), _competenter_ (more competent), _tractabler_ (more tractable), and _familiously_ (familiarly), not being properly in the Hoosier _lingua rustica_, but easily conceivable as possible deviations. Mr. Riley has been criticised for imputing to his characters such phrases as “when the army broke out” and “durin’ the army,” referring to the Civil War, and many careful observers declare that he could never have heard these phrases; but very likely he has heard them from the eccentric countrymen for whom he has so strong an affinity; or he may have coined them outright as essential to the interpretation of such characters. In the main, however, he may be followed safely as an accurate guide in the speech of the Southeastern element of the population, and his questionable usages and inconsistencies are few and slight, as the phrase “don’t you know,” which does not always ring true, or “again” and “agin,” used interchangeably and evidently as the rhyme may hint. The abrupt beginning of a sentence, frequently noticed in Mr. Riley’s dialect verses, is natural. The illiterate often experience difficulty in opening a conversation, expressing only a fragment, to which an interlocutor must prefix for himself the unspoken phrases. There is no imposition in Mr. Riley’s dialect, for his amplifications of it are always for the purpose of aiding in the suggestion of a character as he conceives it; he does not pretend that he portrays in such instances a type found at every cross-roads. “Doc Sifers” and “The Raggedy Man” are not peculiar to Indiana, but have their respective counterparts in such characters as Mark Twain’s “Pudd’n-head Wilson” and the wayside tramp, who has lately been a feature of farce comedy rather than of our social economy. “Fessler’s Bees,” “Nothin’ to say,” “Down to the Capital,” “A Liz-town Humorist,” and “Squire Hawkins’s Story” show Mr. Riley at his happiest as a delineator of the rural type. In these sketches he gives in brief compass the effect of little dramas, now humorous, now touched with simple and natural pathos, and showing a nice appreciation of the color of language which is quite as essential in dialect as in pure English. But it matters little that the _dramatis personæ_ change, or that the literary method varies; the same kindliness, the same blending of humor and pathos, and the same background of “green fields and running brooks” characterize all. “The crude man is,” the poet believes, “generally moral,” and the Riley Hoosier is intuitively religious, and is distinguished by his rectitude and sense of justice.