Among the Danes the book enjoyed a popularity as great, perhaps, as it has had at home. The circulation warranted Mr. Hansen and his publisher in bringing out several other novels of mine. The Danish translator was the only person concerned in the various foreign editions of this book who had the courtesy to ask the author's leave. Under the old conditions in regard to international copyright, an author came to be regarded as one not entitled even to common civilities in the matter of reprinting his works—he was to be plundered without politeness. As I look at the row of my books in the unfamiliar Danish, I am reminded of that New England mother who, on recovering her children carried away by the Canadian Indians, found it impossible to communicate with a daughter who spoke only French and a son who knew nothing but the speech of his savage captors. Mr. Hansen was thoughtful enough to send me the reviews of my books in the Danish newspapers; and he had the double kindness to translate these into English and to leave out all but those that were likely to be agreeable to my vanity. Of these I remember but a single sentence, and that because it was expressed with felicity. The reviewer said of the fun in "The Hoosier School-Master:" "This is humor laughing to keep from bursting into tears."

A year or two before the appearance of "The Hoosier School-Master," a newspaper article of mine touching upon American dialect interested Mr. Lowell, and he urged me to "look for the foreign influence" that has affected the speech of the Ohio River country. My reverence for him as the master in such studies did not prevent me from feeling that the suggestion was a little absurd. But at a later period I became aware that North Irishmen used many of the pronunciations and idioms that distinctly characterized the language of old-fashioned people on the Ohio. Many Ulster men say "wair" for were and "air" for are, for example. Connecting this with the existence of a considerable element of Scotch-Irish names in the Ohio River region, I could not doubt that here was one of the keys the master had bidden me look for. While pursuing at a later period a series of investigations into the culture-history of the American people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I became much interested in the emigration to America from the north of Ireland, a movement that waxed and waned as the great Irish-linen industry of the last century declined or prospered. The first American home of these Irish was Pennsylvania. A portion of them were steady-going, psalm-singing, money-getting people, who in course of time made themselves felt in the commerce, politics, and intellectual life of the nation. There was also a dare-devil element, descended perhaps from those rude borderers who were deported to Ireland more for the sake of the peace of North Britain than for the benefit of Ireland. In this rougher class there was perhaps a larger dash of the Celtic fire that came from the wild Irish women whom the first Scotch settlers in Ulster made the mothers of their progeny. Arrived in the wilds of Pennsylvania, these Irishmen built rude cabins, planted little patches of corn and potatoes, and distilled a whiskey that was never suffered to grow mellow. The forest was congenial to men who spent much the larger part of their time in boisterous sport of one sort or another. The manufacture of the rifle was early brought to Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, direct from the land of its invention by Swiss emigrants, and in the adventurous Scotch-Irishman of the Pennsylvania frontier the rifle found its fellow. Irish settlers became hunters of wild beasts, explorers, pioneers, and warriors against the Indians, upon whom they avenged their wrongs with relentless ferocity. Both the Irish race and the intermingled Pennsylvania Dutch were prolific, and the up-country of Pennsylvania soon overflowed. Emigration was held in check to the westward for a while by the cruel massacres of the French and Indian wars, and one river of population poured itself southward into the fertile valleys of the Virginia mountain country; another and larger flood swept still farther to the south along the eastern borders of the Appalachian range until it reached the uplands of Carolina. When the militia of one county in South Carolina was mustered during the Revolution, it was found that every one of the thirty-five hundred men enrolled were natives of Pennsylvania. These were mainly sons of North Irishmen, and from the Carolina Irish sprang Calhoun, the most aggressive statesman that has appeared in America, and Jackson, the most brilliant military genius in the whole course of our history. Before the close of the Revolution this adventurous race had begun to break over the passes of the Alleghanies into the dark and bloody ground of Kentucky and Tennessee. Soon afterward a multitude of Pennsylvanians of all stocks—the Scotch-Irish and those Germans, Swiss, and Hollanders who are commonly classed together as the Pennsylvania Dutch, as well as a large number of people of English descent—began to migrate down the Ohio Valley. Along with them came professional men and people of more or less culture, chiefly from eastern Virginia and Maryland. There came also into Indiana and Illinois, from the border States and from as far south as North Carolina and Tennessee, a body of "poor whites." These semi-nomadic people, descendants of the colonial bond-servants, formed, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the lowest rank of Hoosiers. But as early as 1845 there was a considerable exodus of these to Missouri. From Pike County, in that State, they wended their way to California, to appear in Mr. Bret Harte's stories as "Pikes." The movement of this class out of Indiana went on with augmented volume in the fifties. The emigrants of this period mostly sought the States lying just west of the Mississippi, and the poorer sort made the trip in little one-horse wagons of the sorriest description, laden mainly with white-headed children and followed by the yellow curs that are the one luxury indispensable to a family of this class. To this migration and to a liberal provision for popular education Indiana owes a great improvement in the average intelligence of her people. As early as 1880, I believe, the State had come to rank with some of the New England States in the matter of literacy.

The folk-speech of the Ohio River country has many features in common with that of the eastern Middle States, while it received but little from the dignified eighteenth-century English of eastern Virginia. There are distinct traces of the North-Irish in the idioms and in the peculiar pronunciations. One finds also here and there a word from the "Pennsylvania Dutch," such as "waumus" for a loose jacket, from the German wamms, a doublet, and "smearcase" for cottage cheese, from the German schmierkäse. The only French word left by the old voyageurs, so far as I now remember, is "cordelle," to tow a boat by a rope carried along the shore.

Substantially the same folk-speech exists wherever the Pennsylvania migration formed the main element of the primitive settlement. I have heard the same dialect in the South Carolina uplands that one gets from a Posey County Hoosier, or rather that one used to get in the old days before the vandal school-master had reduced the vulgar tongue to the monotonous propriety of what we call good English.

In drawing some of the subordinate characters in this tale a little too baldly from the model, I fell into an error common to inexperienced writers. It is amusing to observe that these portrait characters seem the least substantial of all the figures in the book. Dr. Small is a rather unrealistic villain, but I knew him well and respected him in my boyish heart for a most exemplary Christian of good family at the very time that, according to testimony afterward given, he was diversifying his pursuits as a practising physician by leading a gang of burglars. More than one person has been pointed out as the original of Bud Means, and I believe there are one or two