



Produced by David Edwards, David E. Brown, and the Online
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  Affectionately to my Father,
  The Reverend GRIGG THOMPSON.




  HOOSIER MOSAICS.

  By MAURICE THOMPSON.


  NEW YORK:
  E. J. HALE & SON, PUBLISHERS,
  MURRAY STREET.
  1875.


  Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by
  E. J. HALE & SON,
  In the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.




CONTENTS.


                                PAGE.

  _WAS SHE A BOY?_                 _7_

  TROUT'S LUCK,                    29

  _BIG MEDICINE_,                 _50_

  _THE VENUS OF BALHINCH_,        _76_

  THE LEGEND OF POTATO CREEK,      92

  _STEALING A CONDUCTOR_,        _114_

  HOIDEN,                         127

  THE PEDAGOGUE,                  162

  AN IDYL OF THE ROD,             188




WAS SHE A BOY?


No matter what business or what pleasure took me, I once, not long ago,
went to Colfax. Whisper it not to each other that I was seeking a
foreign appointment through the influence of my fellow Hoosier, the late
Vice-President of the United States. O no, I didn't go to the Hon.
Schuyler Colfax at all; but I went to Colfax, simply, which is a little
dingy town, in Clinton County, that was formerly called Midway, because
it is half way between Lafayette and Indianapolis. It was and is a place
of some three hundred inhabitants, eking out an aguish subsistence,
maintaining a swampy, malarious aspect, keeping up a bilious, nay, an
atra-bilious color, the year round, by sucking like an attenuated leech
at the junction, or, rather, the crossing of the I. C. & L., and the L.
C. & S. W. railroads. It lay mouldering, like something lost and
forgotten, slowly rotting in the swamp.

I do not mean to attack the inhabitants of Colfax, for they were good
people, and deserved a better fate than the eternal rattling the ague
took them through from year's end to year's end. Why, they had had the
ague so long that they had no respect for it at all. I've seen a woman
in Colfax shaking with a chill, spanking a baby that had a chill, and
scolding a husband who had a chill, all at once--and I had a dreadful
ague on me at the same time! But, as I have said, they were good people,
and I suppose they are still. They go quietly about the usual business
of dead towns. They have "stores" in which they offer for sale calico,
of the big-figured, orange and red sort, surprisingly cheap. They smoke
those little Cuba sixes at a half cent apiece, and call them cigars;
they hang round the depot, and trade jack-knives and lottery watches on
the afternoons of lazy Sundays; they make harmless sport of the incoming
and outgoing country folk; and, in a word, keep pretty busy at one thing
or another, and above all--they shake.

In Colfax the chief sources of exciting amusement are dog fights and an
occasional row at Sheehan's saloon, a doggery of the regular
old-fashioned, drink, gamble, rob and fight sort--a low place, known to
all the hard bats in the State.

As you pass through the town you will not fail to notice a big sign,
outhanging from the front of the largest building on the principal
street, which reads: "Union Hotel, 1865." From the muddy suburbs of the
place, in every direction, stretch black muck swamps, for the most part
heavily timbered with a variety of oaks, interspersed with sycamores,
ash, and elms. In the damp, shady labyrinths of these boggy woods
millions of lively, wide awake, tuneful mosquitoes are daily
manufactured; and out from decaying logs and piles of fermenting leaves,
from the green pools and sluggish ditch streams, creeps a noxious gas,
known in that region as the "double refined, high pressure, forty hoss
power quintessential of the ager!" So, at least, I was told by the
landlord of the Union Hotel, and his skin had the color of one who knew.

Notwithstanding what I have said, Colfax, in summer, is not wholly
without attractions of a certain kind. It has some yellow dogs and some
brindle ones; it has some cattle and some swine; it has some swallows
and some spotted pigeons; it has cool, fresh smelling winds, and, after
the water has sufficiently dried out, the woods are really glorious
with wild roses, violets, turkey-pea blossoms, and wild pinks. But to
my story.

I was sitting on the long veranda of the Union Hotel, when a rough but
kindly voice said to me:

"Mornin', stranger; gi' me a light, will ye?"

I looked up from the miserable dime novel at which I had been tugging
for the last hour, and saw before me a corpulent man of, perhaps,
forty-five years of age, who stood quite ready to thrust the charred end
of a cigar stump into the bowl of my meerschaum. I gave him a match, and
would fain have returned to Angelina St. Fortescue, the heroine of the
novel, whom I had left standing on the extreme giddy verge of a sheer
Alpine precipice, known, by actual triangulation, to be just seven
thousand feet high, swearing she would leap off if Donald Gougerizeout,
the robber, persisted further in his rough addresses; but my new friend,
the corpulent smoker, seemed bent on a little bit of conversation.

"Thankee, sir. Fine mornin', sir, a'n't it?"

"Beautiful," I replied, raising my head, elevating my arms, and, by a
kind of yawn, taking in a deep draught of the fresh spring weather,
absorbing it, assimilating it, till, like a wave of retarded
electricity, it set my nerves in tune for enjoying the bird songs, and
filled my blood with the ecstasy of vigorous health and youth. I, no
doubt, just then felt the burden of life much less than did the big
yellow dog at my feet, who snapped lazily at the flies.

"Yes, yes, this 'ere's a fine mornin'--julicious, sir, julicious,
indeed; but le' me tell ye, sir, this 'ere wind's mighty deceitful--for
a fact it is, sir, jist as full of ager as a acorn is of meat. It's
blowin' right off'n ponds, and is loaded chock down with the miasm--for
a fact it is, sir."

While delivering this speech, the fat man sat down on the bench beside
me there in the veranda. By this time I had my thumbs in the arm holes
of my vest, and my chest expanded to its utmost--my lungs going like a
steam bellows, which is a way I have in fine weather.

"Monstrous set o' respiratory organs, them o' your'n," he said, eyeing
my manoeuvres. Just then I discovered that he was a physician of the
steam doctor sort, for, glancing down at my feet, I espied his well worn
leather medicine bags. I immediately grew polite. Possibly I might ere
long need some quinine, or mandrake, or a hot