A lady with whom I frequently exchange opinions on the trolley-cars of my town took me to task recently for commending Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s _Main Street_ as an achievement worthy of all respect. “I know a score of Indiana towns and they are not like Gopher Prairie,” she declared indignantly. “No,” I conceded, “they are not; but the Indiana towns you have in mind are older than Gopher Prairie; many of them have celebrated their centennial; they were founded by well-seasoned pioneers of the old American stocks; and an impressive number of the first settlers--I named half a dozen--experienced the same dismay and disgust, and were inspired by the same noble ambition to make the world over that Mr. Lewis has noted in Carol Kennicott’s case.” Not one but many of my neighbors, and friends and acquaintances in other towns, have lately honored me with their views on provincial life with Mr. Lewis’s novel as a text. Most of them admit that Minnesota may be like that, but by all the gods at once things are not so in “my State” or “my town.” This is a habit of thought, a state of mind. There is, I think, something very delightful about it. To encounter it is to be refreshed and uplifted. It is like meeting a stranger who isn’t ashamed to boast of his wife’s cooking. On east and west journeys across the region of the tall corn one must be churlish indeed to repel the man who is keen to enlighten the ignorant as to the happy circumstances of his life. After an hour I experience a pleasurable sense of intimacy with his neighbors. If, when his town is reached, I step out upon the platform with the returning Ulysses, there may be time enough to shake hands with his wife and children, and I catch a glimpse of his son in the waiting motor--(that boy, I’d have you know, took all the honors of his class at our State university)--and it is with real sorrow that I confess my inability to stop off for a day or two to inspect the grain-elevator and the new brickyard and partake of a chicken dinner at the country club--the snappiest in all this part of the State! Main Street is proud of itself, and any newcomer who assumes a critical attitude or is swollen with a desire to retouch the lily is doomed to a chilly reception.