and more of the men and incidents of contemporaneous history. Great spirits still on earth were sojourning. I saw several times, in his last years, the iron-willed Hoosier War Governor, Oliver P. Morton. By the time I was ten, a broader field of observation opening through my parents’ removal to the state capital, I had myself beheld Grant and Sherman; and every day I passed in the street men who had been partners with them in the great, heroic, sad, splendid struggle. These things I set down as a background for the observations that follow,--less as text than as point of departure; yet I believe that bugler, sounding “charge” and “retreat” and “taps” in the dusk, and those trappings of war beneath whose weight I strutted upon that hillside, did much toward establishing in me a certain habit of mind. From that hillside I have since ineluctably viewed my country and my countrymen and the larger world. Emerson records Thoreau’s belief that “the flora of Massachusetts embraced almost all the important plants of America,--most of the oaks, most of the willows, the best pines, the ash, the maple, the beech, the nuts. He returned Kane’s ‘Arctic Voyage’ to a friend of whom he had borrowed it, with the remark that most of the phenomena noted might be observed in Concord.” The complacency of the provincial mind is due less, I believe, to stupidity and ignorance, than to the fact that every American county is in a sense complete, a political and social unit, in which the sovereign rights of a free people are expressed by the court-house and town hall, spiritual freedom by the village church-spire, and hope and aspiration in the school-house. Every reader of American fiction, particularly in the realm of the short story, must have observed the great variety of quaint and racy characters disclosed. These are the _dramatis personæ_ of that great American novel which some one has said is being written in installments. Writers of fiction hear constantly of characters who would be well worth their study. In reading two recent novels that penetrate to the heart of provincial life, Mr. White’s “A Certain Rich Man” and Mrs. Watts’s “Nathan Burke,” I felt that the characters depicted might, with unimportant exceptions, have been found almost anywhere in those American States that shared the common history of Kansas and Ohio. Mr. Winston Churchill, in his admirable novels of New England, has shown how closely the purely local is allied to the universal.