The Hoosier Schoolmaster | Page 6

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 men each of whom flatters himself that he posed for the figure of the first disciple of the Church of the Best Licks. Bud is made up of elements found in some of his race, but not in any one man. Not dreaming that the story would reach beyond the small circulation of Hearth and Home, I used the names of people in Switzerland and Decatur counties, in Indiana, almost without being aware of it. I have heard that a young man bearing the surname given to one of the rudest families in this book had to suffer many gibes while a student at an Indiana college. I here do public penance for my culpable indiscretion.
"Jeems Phillips," name and all, is a real person whom at the time of writing this story I had not seen since I was a lad of nine and he a man of nearly forty. He was a mere memory to me, and was put into the book with some slighting remarks which the real Jeems did not deserve. I did not know that he was living, and it did not seem likely that the story would have vitality enough to travel all the way to Indiana. But the portion referring to Phillips was transferred to the county paper circulating among Jeems' neighbors. For once the good-natured man was, as they say in Hoosier, "mad," and he threatened to thrash the editor. "Do you think he means you?" demanded the editor. "To be sure he does," said the champion speller. "Can you spell?" "I can spell down any master that ever came to our district," he replied. As time passed on, Phillips found himself a lion. Strangers desired an introduction to him as a notability, and invited the champion to dissipate with them at the soda fountain in the village drug store. It became a matter of pride with him that he was the most famous speller in the world. Two years ago, while visiting the town of my nativity, I met upon the street the aged Jeems Phillips, whom I had not seen for more than forty years. I would go far to hear him "spell down" a complacent school-master once more.
The publication of this book gave rise to an amusing revival of the spelling-school as a means of public entertainment, not in rustic regions alone, but in towns also. The furor extended to the great cities of New York and London, and reached at last to farthest Australia, spreading to every region in which English is spelled or spoken. But the effect of the chapter on the spelling-school was temporary and superficial; the only organization that came from the spelling-school mania, so far as I know, was an association of proof-readers in London to discuss mooted points. The sketch of the Church of the Best Licks, however, seems to have made a deep and enduring impression upon individuals and to have left some organized results. I myself endeavored to realize it, and for five years I was the pastor of a church in Brooklyn, organized on a basis almost as simple as that in the Flat Creek school-house. The name I rendered into respectable English, and the Church of the Best Licks became the Church of Christian Endeavor. It was highly successful in doing that which a church ought to do, and its methods of work have been widely copied. After my work as a minister had been definitely closed, the name and the underlying thought of this church were borrowed for a young people's society; and thus the little story of good endeavor in Indiana seems to have left a permanent mark on the ecclesiastical organization of the time.
If any one, judging by the length of this preface, should conclude that I hold my little book in undue esteem, let him know that I owe it more than one grudge. It is said that Thomas Campbell, twenty years after the appearance of his best-known poem, was one day introduced as "the author of 'The Pleasures of Hope.'" "Confound 'The Pleasures of Hope,'" he protested; "can't I write anything else?" So, however much I may prefer my later work, more carefully wrought in respect of thought, structure, and style, this initial novel, the favorite of the larger public, has become inseparably associated with my name. Often I have mentally applied Campbell's imprecation on "The Pleasures of Hope" to this story. I could not write in this vein now if I would, and twenty-one years have made so many changes in me that I dare