A serious novel that cuts close to the quick can hardly fail to disclose one of our most amusing weaknesses--our deeply ingrained local pride that makes us extremely sensitive to criticism in any form of our own bailiwick. The nation may be assailed and we are philosophical about it; but if our home town is peppered with bird shot by some impious huntsman we are at once ready for battle. We do like to brag of our own particular Main Street! It is in the blood of the provincial American to think himself more happily situated and of a higher type than the citizens of any other province. In journeys across the continent, I have sometimes thought that there must be a definite line where bragging begins. I should fix it somewhere west of Pittsburgh, attaining its maximum of innocent complacency in Indiana, diminishing through Iowa and Nebraska, though ranging high in Kansas and Colorado and there gathering fresh power for a dash to the coast, where stout Cortez and all his men would indeed look at each other with a mild surmise to hear the children of the Pacific boast of their landscape and their climate, and the kindly fruits of their soil. When I travel beyond my State’s boundaries I more or less consciously look for proof of Indiana’s superiority. Where I fail to find it I am not without my explanations and excuses. If I should be kidnapped and set down blindfolded in the midst of Ohio on a rainy night, I should know, I am sure, that I was on alien soil. I frequently cross Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska, and never without a sense of a change of atmosphere in passing from one to the other. Kansas, from territorial days, has been much more strenuously advertised than Nebraska. The very name Kansas is richer in its connotations. To think of it is to recall instantly the days of border warfare; John Brown of Osawatomie, the New England infusion, the Civil War soldiers who established themselves on the free soil after Appomattox; grasshoppers and the days of famine; populism and the Sockless Socrates of Medicine Lodge, the brilliant, satiric Ingalls, Howe’s _Story of a Country Town_, William Allen White of Emporia, and _A Certain Rich Man_, down to and including the present governor, the Honorable Henry J. Allen, beyond question the most beguiling man to sit at meat with in all America. II