There are in this community men and women who rank with the best talkers I have ever heard. Their neighbors are proud of them and produce them on occasion to represent the culture, the wit and humor, of the town. Two women of this place are most discerning students of character. They tell stories with a masterly touch, and with the economy of words, the whimsical comment, the pauses and the unforeseen climaxes that distinguished the storytelling of Twain and Riley. The inhabitants make jokes about their Main Street. They poke fun at themselves as being hicks and rubes, living far from the great centres of thought, while discussing the newest books and finding, I fancy, a mischievous pleasure in casually telling you something which you, as a resident of the near-by capital with its three hundred and twenty thousand people, ought to have known before. The value of a local literature, where it is honest, is that it preserves a record of change. It is a safe prediction that some later chronicler of Gopher Prairie will present a very different community from that revealed in _Main Street_. Casting about for an instance of a State whose history is illustrated by its literature, I pray to be forgiven if I fall back upon Indiana. Edward Eggleston was an early, if not indeed the first, American realist. It is now the habit of many Indianians to flout the _Hoosier Schoolmaster_ as a libel upon a State that struts and boasts of its culture and refuses to believe that it ever numbered ignorant or vulgar people among its inhabitants. Eggleston’s case is, however, well-supported by testimony that would pass muster under the rules of evidence in any fair court of criticism. Riley, coming later, found kindlier conditions, and sketched countless types of the farm and the country town, and made painstaking studies of the common speech. His observations began with a new epoch--the return of the soldiers from the Civil War. The veracity of his work is not to be questioned; his contribution to the social history of his own Hoosier people is of the highest value. Just as Eggleston and Riley left records of their respective generations, so Mr. Tarkington, arriving opportunely to preserve unbroken the apostolic succession, depicts his own day with the effect of contributing a third panel in a series of historical paintings. Thanks to our provincial literature, we may view many other sections through the eyes of novelists; as, the Maine of Miss Jewett, the Tennessee of Miss Murfree, the Kentucky of James Lane Allen, the Virginia of Mr. Page, Miss Johnston, and Miss Glasgow, the Louisiana of Mr. Cable. (I am sorry for the new generation that doesn’t know the charm of _Old Creole Days_ and _Madame Delphine_!) No doubt scores of motorists traversing Minnesota will hereafter see in every small town a Gopher Prairie, and peer at the doctors’ signs in the hope of catching the name of Kennicott!