A fault of all of Eggleston’s earlier stories is their too serious insistence on the moral they carried--a resort to the Dickens method of including Divine Providence among the _dramatis personæ_; but this is not surprising in one in whom there was, by his own confession, a life-long struggle “between the lover of literary art and the religionist, the reformer, the philanthropist, the man with a mission.” There is little humor in these tales,--there was doubtless little in the life itself,--but there is abundant good nature. In all he maintains consistently the point of view of the realist, his lapses being chiefly where the moralist has betrayed him. There are many pictures which denote his understanding of the illuminative value of homely incident in the life he then knew best; there are the spelling-school, the stirring religious debates, the barbecue, the charivari, the infare, glimpses of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” and the “Hard Cider” campaign. Those times rapidly receded; Indiana is one of the older States now, and but for Eggleston’s tales there would be no trustworthy record of the period he describes. Lowell had made American dialect respectable, and had used it as the vehicle for his political gospel; but Eggleston invoked the Hoosier _lingua rustica_ to aid in the portrayal of a type. He did not, however, employ dialect with the minuteness of subsequent writers, notably Mr. James Whitcomb Riley; but the Southwestern idiom impressed him, and his preface and notes in the later edition of “The Schoolmaster” are invaluable to the student. Dialect remains in Indiana, as elsewhere, largely a matter of observation and opinion. There has never been a uniform folk-speech peculiar to the people living within the borders of the State. The Hoosier dialect, so called, consisting more of elisions and vulgarized pronunciations than of true idiom, is spoken wherever the Scotch-Irish influence is perceptible in the West Central States, notably in the southern counties of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. It is not to be confounded with the cruder speech of the “poor-whitey,” whose wild strain in the Hoosier blood was believed by Eggleston to be an inheritance of the English bond-slave. There were many vague and baffling elements in the Ohio Valley speech, but they passed before the specialists of the Dialect Society could note them. Mr. Riley’s Hoosier is more sophisticated than Eggleston’s, and thirty years of change lie between them,--years which wholly transformed the State, physically and socially. It is diverting to have Eggleston’s own statement that the Hoosiers he knew in his youth were wary of New England provincialisms, and that his Virginia father threatened to inflict corporal punishment on his children “if they should ever give the peculiar vowel sound heard in some parts of New England in such words as ‘roof’ and ‘root.’”