“The Ohio countryside is not romantic as to landscape; nevertheless, it has a kind of comfortable charm; I have described it pretty accurately in _Nathan Burke_. In my day there were still passenger-pigeons by the uncounted thousands, and of course quail, gray squirrels, and other kinds of game in like abundance. There was an old man--at least I thought him old then--named Ben Rhodes, who used to make his living shooting and trapping, and who was, in fact, the last of the pioneers. He wore a coon-skin cap with the bushy tail hanging down his back; and butternut-dyed clothes. He could shoot a squirrel through the eye with a rifle--a _rifle_, mind you!--at the utmost distance the weapon would carry. ‘Yeh waste a power o’ powder ’n’ shot with them thar shot-guns,’ he would say. ‘Yeh taken twenty shot when _one_ orter do.’ I remember him sitting on our back-porch, chewing tobacco, and skinning squirrels, the last an operation of hideous dexterity. You rip the animal down the front, and then after certain swift and mysterious performances with Ben’s hunting-knife which was always horribly bright and keen, fit to scalp people with, you take hold of the ears, you set your foot on the tail, and with one infallible, quick jerk you somehow or other turn it inside out and there in a trice is the furry pelt intact, and there the dreadful skinless corpse of the squirrel with all its muscles showing, red and slick and shining! I never see a squirrel without thinking of Ben, who was a foot-loose creature and wandered off at last, and died somewhere, much like the wild things he hunted. If I have been particular to describe him here, it is because thirty years afterwards I wrote about him and called him Jake Darnell; and in all the writings I have done for which I have time and again been accused of having taken living models, he is absolutely the only actual portrait. I could not have imagined Ben; one must be born and brought up in the backwoods of Ohio to know what manner of man he was. This answers, out of its order, to be sure, one of your questions, that is: to what extent are my novels autobiographical or reminiscent of real persons? Except as regards Ben, they are not at all reminiscent of any one real person, and nothing I have ever written has reflected my own life, consciously at least. An author, I think, in picturing his own world, as seen through his own eyes, may easily tell more about himself than he knows.