Riley was an American writer known as the “Hoosier poet”, and made a start writing newspaper verse in Hoosier dialect for the Indianapolis Journal in 1875. His favorite authors were Burns and Dickens. This collection of poems is a romanticized and mostly boy-centered paean to a 19th century rural American owning-class childhood. I’ve included the pieces I did because they’re the ones I most enjoyed when I read a copy of the collection handed down from my great-grandfather.