For many years Mr. Finley was known as "The Hoosier Poet," an appellation since transferred to James Whitcomb Riley, who wrote of him: "The voice that sang the Hoosier's Nest-- Of Western singers first and best--" Readers are always interested in the development of an author. They naturally inquire of his ancestry, early environment and education: how much was due to native talent, how much acquired by association with kindred spirits. Mr. Finley's ancestors were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians; the family was driven from Scotland to Ireland by religious persecution, and failing to find the religious and political freedom they sought the seven brothers emigrated to America, in 1724. Samuel Finley became president of Princeton College; John explored the western wilds with Daniel Boone, and the youngest brother, William, settled on a farm in Western Pennsylvania. His son, Andrew, married and removed to Brownsburg, Rockridge county, Virginia, where John Finley was born, January 11, 1797. Andrew Finley was a merchant in the village, but the family occupied a farm in a beautiful valley near the Blue Ridge Mountains. This mountain range could not fail to impress a child of poetic temperament--the blue haze veiling its summit, the drifting clouds that clung to its side, the rising sun dispersing the mists in the valley, or, the shadows creeping over valley and mountain as the setting sun disappeared beyond the western horizon, all left lasting pictures in his memory and influenced his after life. His school days were cut short by his father's financial reverses, following the capture of a cargo of flour by the British during the war of 1812. This misfortune threw the boy of sixteen on his own resources, and, as nothing better offered he accepted a position with a relative who was conducting a tanning and currying business in Greenbrier county. This was a most humiliating alternative for a young Virginian whose surroundings led him to look upon manual labor as only fit for slaves, but it was part of the discipline of life which resulted in marked regard for all practical workmen, and an abhorence of the institution of slavery. In 1816 he joined an emigrant company and with fifty dollars in his pocket, a saddle-horse and rifle and a pair of saddle-bags, turned his face towards the "Eldorado of the West." His first stopping place was Cincinnati, Ohio, but in 1820, we find him in Richmond, Ind., where he lived to see a small village develop into a thriving city.