The Days of a Man 1879 



will work at anything to pay their way. He also 

 cites admiringly the case of a lad who rewrote an 

 essay thirty-six times before presenting it. 1 

 tf ne Somewhat later appeared a well-known book of 

 Hoosier s i m ilar character, ''The Hoosier Schoolmaster/' by 

 matr" Edward Eggleston. This described life in Switzer- 

 land County on the Ohio River below Cincinnati, 

 near the Swiss colony of Vevay. Eggleston frankly 

 gave (as Hall did not in any case) the real names 

 of the people he described. James H. Means, son 

 of Bud Means, one of his leading characters, is a 

 well-known mining engineer in London, a graduate 

 both of Indiana and of Stanford. 



But I must not leave my readers with the impres- 

 sion that Bloomington is still a pioneer village. It 

 has now become a well-kept city with asphalt streets, 

 a new stone courthouse, and a general air of pros- 

 perity. 



About Bloomington are many places and objects 

 of interest connected with the geological forma- 

 tion. There the surface rocks are mainly of the 

 Burlington Subcarboniferous, represented by thick- 

 bedded, white oolitic limestone, which through its 

 value for building purposes has enriched the town. 

 Underlying that formation are the Keokuk shales, 

 remarkable for their wealth of geodes, concretions of 

 quartz usually about six inches through but vary- 

 ing in size from that of a cherry to that of a big 

 pumpkin; these are found in all the local streams 

 which have cut down through the limestone. A 



1 I am informed that Professor Hall's book is about to be reprinted by 

 an Eastern house, as a contribution to our knowledge of American pioneer life. 



C 198 H 



