But the car-conductor has made a mistake. I have not read this book, but I believe. Though I have not seen, I believe and am blessed. And though in the Missouri train, I am not going to Missouri. I am stepping off at Flora, Illinois, to catch the Beardstown local train to Springfield, which unlike St. Louis and Jerusalem and Capernaum, and perhaps more like Tyre and Sidon, is a city of faith where they have bread from heaven to eat. Not that I am staying in Springfield. But there I pick up the poet. That is where he haunts--“where Lincoln dreamed in Illinois.” The poet thinks that the world could be regenerated from a centre in Illinois--this beautiful state upon which Chicago has thought fit to rear its awful form. Some one of Illinois, not the poet, wrote to me, “What do you think of Springfield as a centre of world thought?” Now I know the craze of “Boost your home town” can be, and often is, carried to excess, and little Springfield is not even on a main line from New York. But neither is Bethlehem nor the human heart. If you want to regenerate your wicked world you can begin here and now--or, to use the language of the country, put your hand to your bosom and say it--“_You can begin right here._” And then, to quote the poet himself, you will have-- Crossed the Appalachians, And turned to blazing warrior souls Of the lazy forest. Springfield will not hold us. But we shall take Springfield with us. We are going to take it in our hearts and place it on the top of the Rocky Mountains, at the Triple Divide, where the waters of the new world flow north and east and west-- [Illustration] _Going tramping again, Going to the mountains, To recapture the stars, To meet again the nymphs of the fountains. To visit the bear, To salute the eagles, To be kissed all night by wild-flowers in the grass!_ [Illustration: TO HEART’S DESIRE] II. FINDING THE POET FLORA, Illinois, where one changes for Springfield, has a Main Street, and, like many a little town of the Middle West of America, looks rather self-consciously askance at visitors, like the village that voted the earth was flat in Kipling’s tale. For the novel of the hour is called _Main Street_ and is sold to hundreds of thousands of people and read by every American who reads anything, and is bitterly or jocularly discussed at every tea-table. It sheds a bright light on the life of a typical little town in the Middle West. It names the town Gopher Prairie--because the Middle West is prairie land and the gopher-rats or marmots live there in myriads in their little burrows. The novelist seems to suggest that the people themselves are a species of gopher, a little people, limited of view, good-natured, of the earth earthy, but always bobbing-up. Because of the criticism implied in this novel the Middle West would rather now be called the “Central West.”