I now know that in conversations with authors there should be long pauses. This is because every remark, after being received by the ear, must be submitted to a strict brain analysis, and then given a soul-bath before it is proper to venture a reply. I have found, also, that in answering too quickly, I myself lose caste. I now make it a point never to respond to a question addressed to me by an author until I have counted twenty. If the author is very distinguished, I make it fifty for good measure.
Much more remains to be said about authors. I realize that I have, as it were, merely scraped the surface of the subject. Space, however, allows me only room to add one last anecdote. But this one may indeed prove more illuminating than all that has gone before. Once, then, in a certain city where I was visiting, I was invited to attend a meeting of its authors' club. 'Now at this meeting,' I instructed myself before going, 'you will probably encounter the most serious species of author native to this climate.' Accordingly I set forth with a light and expectant heart. As I entered the hall I was aware of another person entering from an opposite door,--a serious, awkward person, with just that peculiar, vague, and almost feeble-minded expression that I have come to associate with writers in general. 'Behold, my child, the SERIOUS AUTHOR,' I commented happily to myself. I looked again, and saw it was _myself in a mirror_!
_Viola._ And what should I do in Illyria? My brother he is in Elysium.
I am a provincial American. My forbears were farmers or country-town folk. They followed the long trail over the mountains out of Virginia and North Carolina, with brief sojourns in Western Pennsylvania and Kentucky. My parents were born, the one in Kentucky, the other in Indiana, within two and four hours of the spot where I pen these reflections, and I was a grown man and had voted before I saw the sea or any Eastern city.
In attempting to illustrate the provincial point of view out of my own experiences I am moved by no wish to celebrate either the Hoosier commonwealth--which has not lacked nobler advertisement--or myself; but by the hope that I may cheer many who, flung by fate upon the world's byways, shuffle and shrink under the reproach of their metropolitan brethren.