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I sented several pictures, by contemporary observers, of society and conditions in Illinois a century ago. In the present volume we return to the same field, and in the narra­ tive of Mrs. Christiana Holm es Tillson afford to twentieth-century readers a graphic charac­ terization o f the life of the founders o f Illinois as it was lived and later recorded by an acute observer of N e w England lineage and rearing. Between the Illinois described b y M rs. Tillson and the present highly industrialized commonwealth o f over six million people lies a great gulf. Probably there would be no exaggeration in saying that in all the material aspects of life the dweller in rural Illinois in 1820 (and all Illinois was then rural) if trans­ planted to the Illinois of today would find fewer familiar objects and more occasion for aston­ ishment than would the rural contemporary of A u g u stu s C aesar if similarly transplanted to the Illinois o f 1820. O nly by a conscious effort o f the imagination, therefore, supple­ mented by the aid of some definite informa­ tion, can the present-day reader visualize the conditions which supply the setting ...