hey all did!

However, having resolved upon being printed by the best periodicals I
persisted. Notwithstanding rejection after rejection I maintained an
elevated aim and continued to fire away.

There was a certain arrogance in all this, I will admit, but there was
also sound logic, for I was seeking the ablest editorial judgment and in
this way I got it. My manuscripts were badly put together (I used cheap
paper and could not afford a typist), hence I could not blame the
readers who hurried my stories back at me. No doubt my illegible writing
as well as the blunt, unrelenting truth of my pictures repelled them.
One or two friendly souls wrote personal notes protesting against my
"false interpretation of western life."

The fact that I, a working farmer, was presenting for the first time in
fiction the actualities of western country life did not impress them as
favorably as I had expected it to do. My own pleasure in being true was
not shared, it would seem, by others. "Give us charming love stories!"
pleaded the editors.

"No, we've had enough of lies," I replied. "Other writers are telling
the truth about the city,--the artisan's narrow, grimy, dangerous job is
being pictured, and it appears to me that the time has come to tell the
truth about the barn-yard's daily grind. I have lived the life and I
know that farming is not entirely made up of berrying, tossing the
new-mown hay and singing _The Old Oaken Bucket_ on the porch by
moonlight.

"The working farmer," I went on to argue, "has to live in February as
well as June. He must pitch manure as well as clover. Milking as
depicted on a blue china plate where a maid in a flounced petticoat is
caressing a gentle Jersey cow in a field of daisies, is quite unlike
sitting down to the steaming flank of a stinking brindle heifer in
flytime. Pitching odorous timothy in a poem and actually putting it into
a mow with the temperature at ninety-eight in the shade are widely
separated in fact as they should be in fiction. For me," I concluded,
"the grime and the mud and the sweat and the dust exist. They still form
a large part of life on the farm, and I intend that they shall go into
my stories in their proper proportions."

Alas! Each day made me more and more the dissenter from accepted
economic as well as literary conventions. I became less and less of the
booming, indiscriminating patriot. Precisely as successful politicians,
popular preachers and vast traders diminish