Under the spur of Taine's argument, I now proceeded to write a short story wholly in the dialect spoken in my childhood by rustics on the north side of the Ohio River.

This tale I called "The Hoosier School-Master." It consisted almost entirely of an autobiographical narration in dialect by Mirandy Means of the incidents that form the groundwork of the present story.

I was the newly installed editor of a weekly journal, _Hearth and Home_, and I sent this little story in a new dialect to my printer.

It chanced that one of the proprietors of the paper saw a part of it in proof.

He urged me to take it back and make a longer story out of the materials, and he expressed great confidence in the success of such a story.