These Main Streets, however, except for the sophisticated eyes of a college girl inauspiciously married, are probably not so bad as the realist paints them. They are dull, but genuine. They exhibit our modern civilisation without too many shams. See the people working in the heat. The minds of the young are set on their dull jobs and not thinking of drink or sex--it is sufficiently wonderful. There are “Main Street” towns in every country in Europe, and life is dull in them though adorned by fights and drinks and “hussies”--but where will you find such an unexhausted _élan_ and zest for the unornamented reality that America affords? Where else moreover will you find the working-men to-day working in silk shirts? Life in Main Street seems worth while, at least to those who live there. It’s a by-line from Flora to Springfield, and you plough iron slowly through Illinois corn. An old mechanical car-conductor with grey straw hat and fat stubby face calls the stations one by one in an outlandish accent which to a stranger is entirely baffling. He collects the tickets, and if you are for Springfield he puts a red check in your hat-band; if you are for anywhere else it is a white check. Springfield is now in the mind’s eye as a large place and is printed everywhere in big type. The Springfield _Register_ and the Springfield _Journal_ make showing. * * * * * I READ the newspapers and then tick off the names of the stations on the printed time-table of the B. and O. folder and patiently await the city and its bard. A four-hour journey in a slow train in England would seem intolerable, but America has a different sense of time and space, and a long time is not thought so long. At last, in the late dusk, behold Springfield, Illinois, and the unmistakable marble of the poet’s face under a small black felt--“waitin’ for me, prayin’ for me,” and certainly not really believing in the act of faith which can bring the mountain to Mahomet. In the literary world when invitations are rife there is a golden rule--_Promise everything and do just what you like._ So one never really knows whether “Yes, I’ll come,” means yea, yea or nay, nay. It meant yea, yea this time, and so, getting out of the Beardstown local which pulled up outside the station, behold--two strong men stand face to face and they come from the ends of the earth. Vachel Lindsay rasped out sentences of welcome in broad Illinois and I replied in whispering English, and we bundled along Fifth Street for home. Then mother, of seventy years, tiptoed and curtsied and smiled with the roguishness of a young maid, and brought us in. So we sit now on rocking-chairs and talk while beads of moisture roll ticklingly adown our brows, and it is home.