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James Whitcomb Riley was born in Greenfield, Indiana, in 1849, and died at Indianapolis in 1916. His success was largely due to his ability to present homely phases of life in the Hoosier dialect. "The Raggedy Man" is a good illustration of this skill. In his prime Mr. Riley was an excellent oral interpreter of his own work, and his personifications of the Hoosier types in his poems in recitals all over the country had much to do with giving him an understanding body of readers. He had much of the power in which Stevenson was so supreme—that power of remembering accurately and giving full expression to the points of view of childhood. The perennial fascination of the circus as in "The Circus Day Parade" illustrates this particularly well. "The Treasures of the Wise Man" represents another class of Mr. Riley's poems in which he moralizes in a fashion that makes people willing to be preached at. It may be said very truly that most of his poems have their chief attraction in enabling older readers to recall the almost vanished thrilling delights of youth, but poems that do that are generally found to interest children also.