People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 January 1894 — James Whitcomb Riley’s Farm Life. [ARTICLE]

James Whitcomb Riley’s Farm Life.

From u. conversation lietween hji*. Kiley mid Hamlin Garluixl, In McClure’s Magazine for February. “All I got of farm life I picked up right from this distance—this town—this old homestead. Of course, Greenfield was nothing but a farmer town then, and besides, father had a farm just on the edge of town, and in cornplantin’ times he used to press us boys into service, and we went very loathfully, at least I did. I got bold of farm life in some way—all ways, in fact. I might not have made use of it if I had been closer to it than this. “Sometimes some real country boy gives me the round turn on some farm points. For instance, here comes one stepping up to uie: ‘You never lived on a farm,’ he says. ‘Why not?’ says I. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘a turkey-cock gobbles, but he don’t ky-ouck as your poetry says.’ He had me right there. It’s the turkey hen that ky-oucks. ‘Well, you’ll never hear another turkey-cock of mine ky-ouckin’,’ says I.” While I laughed, Riley became serious again. “But generally I hit on the right symbols. I get the frost on the pumpkin and the fodder in the shock; and I see the frost on the old axe they split the pumpkins with for feed, and I get the smell of the fodder and the cattle, so that it brings up the right picture in the right picture in the mind ol the reader. I don’t know how I do it. It ain’t me.” His voice took on a deepei note, and his face shone with a strange sort of mysticism which often comes out in his earnest moments. He put his fingers to his lips in a descriptive gesture, as if he held a trumpet. “I’m only the ‘wilier’ through which the whistle comes.”

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