It is always a matter for speculation as to just what effect a college training would have upon men of Riley’s type, who, missing the inscribed portals, nevertheless find their way into the house of literature. I give my opinion for what it may be worth, that he would have been injured rather than benefited by an ampler education. He was chiefly concerned with human nature, and it was his fortune to know profoundly those definite phases and contrasts of life that were susceptible of interpretation in the art of which he was sufficiently the master. Of the general trend of society and social movements he was as unconscious as though he lived on another planet. I am disposed to think that he profited by his ignorance of such things, which left him to the peaceful contemplation of the simple phenomena of life that had early attracted him. Nothing seriously disturbed his inveterate provincial habit of thought. He manifested Thoreau’s indifference--without the Yankee’s scorn--for the world beyond his dooryard. “I can see,” he once wrote me, “when you talk of your return and the prospective housewarming of the new home, that your family’s united heart is right here in old Indianapolis--high Heaven’s sole and only understudy.” And this represented his very sincere feeling about “our” town; no other was comparable to it! III He did his writing at night, a fact which accounted for the spacious leisure in which his days were enveloped. He usually had a poem pretty thoroughly fixed in his mind before he sought paper, but the actual writing was often a laborious process; and it was his habit, while a poem was in preparation, to carry the manuscript in his pocket for convenience of reference. The elisions required by dialect and his own notions of punctuation--here he was a law unto himself--brought him into frequent collision with the lords of the proof desk; but no one, I think, ever successfully debated with him any point of folk speech. I once ventured to suggest that his use of the phrase “durin’ the army,” as a rustic veteran’s way of referring to the Civil War, was not general, but probably peculiar to the individual he had heard use it. He stoutly defended his phrase and was ready at once with witnesses in support of it as a familiar usage of Indiana veterans.