Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[76] is so with our native-born population generally. In the best volume of New England stories ever written—it is perhaps needless to say that I refer to ‘Five Hundred Dollars a Year and Other Stories,’ by Mr. H. W. Chaplin—there is an inimitable scene in a jury-room where the hero, ‘Eli,’ holds out during many hours for the innocence of a wronged man. The jurymen are commonplace personages enough—a sea captain, a butcher, a pedler, and so on—and yet their talk through page after page brings out in each a type of character so vivid and distinct that you feel sure that you would know each interlocutor afterward, if you met him in the street. He who approaches human nature in such a spirit need have no fear of the dead level.