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The typical Cambridge house as I saw it persists in my recollection as being among the most characteristic and comfortable of “real” American phenomena.  And one reason why I insisted, in a previous chapter, on the special Americanism of Indianapolis is that Indianapolis is full of a modified variety of these houses which is even more characteristically American—­to my mind—­than the Cambridge style itself.  Indianapolis being by general consent the present chief center of letters in the United States, it is not surprising that I, an author, knew more people from Indianapolis than from any other city.  Indeed, I went to Indianapolis simply because I had old friends there, and not at all in the hope of inspecting a city characteristically American.  It was quite startlingly different from the mental picture I had formed of it.

I think that in order to savor Indianapolis properly one should approach it as I approached it—­in an accommodation-train on a single track, a train with a happy-go-lucky but still agreeable service in its restaurant-car, a train that halts at every barn-door in the vast flat, featureless fields of yellow stubble, rolling sometimes over a muddy, brown river, and skirting now and then a welcome wooded cleft in the monotony of the landscape.  The scenes at those barn-doors were full of the picturesque and of the racy.  A farmer with a gun and a brace of rabbits and a dog leaping up at them, while two young women talked to or at the farmer from a distance; a fat little German girl in a Scotch frock, cleaning outside windows with the absorbed seriousness of a grandmother; a group of boys dividing their attention between her and the train; an old woman driving a cart, and a negro gesticulating and running after the cart; and all of them, save the nigger, wearing gloves—­presumably as a protection against the strong wind that swept through the stubble and shook the houses and the few trees.  Those houses, in all their summariness and primitive crudity, yet reminded one of the Cambridge homes; they exhibited some remains of the pre-Revolution style.

And then you come to the inevitable State Fair grounds, and the environs of the city which is the capital and heart of all those plains.

And after you have got away from the railroad station and the imposing hotels and the public monuments and the high central buildings—­an affair of five minutes in an automobile—­you discover yourself in long, calm streets of essential America.  These streets are rectangular; the streets of Cambridge abhor the straight line.  They are full everywhere of maple-trees.  And on either side they are bordered with homes—­each house detached, each house in its own fairly spacious garden, each house individual and different from all the rest.  Few of the houses are large; on the other hand, none of them is small:  this is the region of the solid middle class, the class which loves comfort and piques itself on its amenities, but is a little ashamed or too timid to be luxurious.