The provincial American and other papers

I AM a provincial American. My forebears were farmers or country-town folk. They followed the long trail over the mountains out of Virginia and North Carolina, with brief sojour...

Many complain that we Americans give too much time to politics, but there could be no safer outlet for that “added drop of nervous fluid” which Colonel Higginson found in us and...

A fault of all of Eggleston’s earlier stories is their too serious insistence on the moral they carried--a resort to the Dickens method of including Divine Providence among the...

The Hoosiers assemble at Indianapolis in great throngs with slight excuse. In addition to the steam railroads that radiate in every direction interurban traction lines have late...

When you and I, my brother, are called on to address the young, how blithely we congratulate our hearers upon being the inheritors of the wisdom of all the ages. This is one of...

Now and then I hear it asserted that the church is not losing its hold upon the people. Many clergymen and laymen resent the oft-repeated statement that we Americans are not as...

“My church home” is an old phrase one still hears in communities whose social life is not yet wholly divorced from the church. There is something pleasant and reassuring in the...

While we talked a cablegram was brought to Smith; he read it and frowned. Mrs. Smith met my eyes and shook her head; Fanny frugally subtracted two thirds of the silver Smith was...

Jessamine is difficult. I thought of it now with a pang, as her brown curls lay soft against a red cushion and she crunched a biscuit, heavily stuccoed with marmalade, with her...

When I had completed the first draft, I began retouching. I liked my tale so much that I was reluctant to part with it; I enjoyed playing with it, and I think I rewrote the most...

You, sir, who re-read “The Newcomes” every year, and you, madam, reverently dusting your Jane Austen,--I am sadder than you can be that my talent is so slender; but is it not a...