contributed to juvenile periodicals; but these early writings were in no sense remarkable. “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” appeared serially in “Hearth and Home” in 1871. It was written in intervals of editorial work and was a _tour de force_ for which the author expected so little publicity that he gave his characters the names of persons then living in Switzerland and Decatur counties, Indiana, with no thought that the story would ever penetrate to its habitat. But the homely little tale, with all its crudities and imperfections, made a wide appeal. It was pirated at once in England; it was translated into French by “Madame Blanc,” and was published in condensed form in the “Revue des Deux Mondes”; and later, with one of Mr. Aldrich’s tales and other stories by Eggleston, in book form. It was translated into German and Danish also. “Le Maître d’Ecole de Flat Creek” was the title as set over into French, and the Hoosier dialect suffered a sea-change into something rich and strange by its cruise into French waters. The story depicts Indiana in its darkest days. The State’s illiteracy as shown by the census of 1830 was 14.32 per cent as against 5.54 in the neighboring State of Ohio. The “no lickin’, no learnin’” period which Eggleston describes is thus a matter of statistics; but even before he wrote the old order had changed and Caleb Mills, an alumnus of Dartmouth, had come from New England to lead the Hoosier out of darkness into the light of free schools. The story escaped the oblivion which overtakes most books for the young by reason of its freshness and novelty. It was, indeed, something more than a story for boys, though, like “Tom Sawyer” and “The Story of a Bad Boy,” it is listed among books of permanent interest to youth. It shows no unusual gift of invention; its incidents are simple and commonplace; but it daringly essayed a record of local life in a new field, with the aid of a dialect of the people described, and thus became a humble but important pioneer in the development of American fiction. It is true that Bret Harte and Mark Twain had already widened the borders of our literary domain westward; and others, like Longstreet, had turned a few spadefuls of the rich Southern soil; but Harte was of the order of romancers, and Mark Twain was a humorist, while Longstreet, in his “Georgia Scenes,” gives only the eccentric and fantastic. Eggleston introduced the Hoosier at the bar of American literature in advance of the Creole of Mr. Cable or the negro of Mr. Page or Mr. Harris, or the mountaineer of Miss Murfree, or the delightful shore-folk of Miss Jewett’s Maine.