When “David Harum” appeared, characters similar to the hero of that novel were reported in every part of the country. I rarely visit a town that has not its cracker-barrel philosopher, or a poet who would shine but for the callous heart of the magazine editor, or an artist of supreme though unrecognized talent, or a forensic orator of wonderful powers, or a mechanical genius whose inventions are bound to revolutionize the industrial world. In Maine, in the back room of a shop whose windows looked down upon a tidal river, I have listened to tariff discussions in the dialect of Hosea Biglow; and a few weeks later have heard farmers along the un-salt Wabash debating the same questions from a point of view that revealed no masted ships or pine woods, with a new sense of the fine tolerance and sanity and reasonableness of our American people. Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, one of our shrewdest students of provincial character, introduced me one day to a friend of his in a village near Indianapolis who bore a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, and who had something of Lincoln’s gift for humorous narration. This man kept a country store, and his attitude toward his customers, and “trade” in general, was delicious in its drollery. Men said to be “like Lincoln” have not been rare in the Mississippi Valley, and politicians have been known to encourage belief in the resemblance. Colonel Higginson once said that in the Cambridge of his youth any member of the Harvard faculty could answer any question within the range of human knowledge; whereas in these days of specialization some man can answer the question, but it may take a week’s investigation to find him. In “our town”--“a poor virgin, sir, an ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own!”--I dare say it was possible in that _post-bellum_ era to find men competent to deal with almost any problem. These were mainly men of humble beginnings and all essentially the product of our American provinces. I should like to set down briefly the ineffaceable impression some of these characters left upon me. I am precluded by a variety of considerations from extending this recital. The rich field of education I ignore altogether; and I may mention only those who have gone. As it is beside my purpose to prove that mine own people are other than typical of those of most American communities, I check my exuberance. Sad, indeed, the offending if I should protest too much! II