If you do not in this provincial capital meet an author at every corner, you are at least never safe from men and women who read books. In many Missouri River towns a stranger must still listen to the old wail against the railroads; at Indianapolis he must listen to politics, and possibly some one will ask his opinion of a sonnet, just as though it were a cigar. A judge of the United States Court sitting at Indianapolis, was in the habit of locking the door of his private office and reading Horace to visiting attorneys. There was, indeed, a time--_consule Planco_--when most of the federal officeholders at Indianapolis were bookish men. Three successive clerks of the federal courts were scholars; the pension agent was an enthusiastic Shakespearean; the district attorney was a poet; and the master of chancery a man of varied learning, who was so excellent a talker that, when he met Lord Chief Justice Coleridge abroad, the English jurist took the Hoosier with him on circuit, and wrote to the justice of the American Supreme Court who had introduced them, to “send me another man as good.” It is possible for a community which may otherwise lack a true local spirit to be unified through the possession of a sense of humor; and even in periods of financial depression the town has always enjoyed the saving grace of a cheerful, centralized intelligence. The first tavern philosophers stood for this, and the courts of the early times were enlivened by it,--as witness all Western chronicles. The Middle Western people are preëminently humorous, particularly those of the Southern strain from which Lincoln sprang. During all the years that the Hoosier suffered the reproach of the outside world, the citizen of the capital never failed to appreciate the joke when it was on himself; and looking forth from the wicket of the city gate, he was still more keenly appreciative when it was “on” his neighbors. The Hoosier is a natural story-teller; he relishes a joke, and to talk is his ideal of social enjoyment. This was true of the early Hoosier, and it is true to-day of his successor at the capital. The Monday night meetings of the Indianapolis Literary Club--organized in 1877 and with a continuous existence to this time--have been marked by racy talk. The original members are nearly all gone; but the sayings of a group of them--the stiletto thrusts of Fishback, the lawyer; the droll inadvertences of Livingston Howland, the judge; and the inimitable anecdotes of Myron Reed, soldier and preacher--crept beyond the club’s walls and became town property. This club is old and well seasoned. It is exclusive--so much so that one of its luminaries remarked that if all of its members should be expelled for any reason, none could hope to be readmitted. It has entertained but four pilgrims from the outer world,--Matthew Arnold, Dean Farrar, Joseph Parker, and John Fiske.