Southern Literature From 1579-1895 Part 50

FOOTNOTES:

[39] By permission of Mrs. Lanier, and Charles Scribner's Sons, N. Y.

[40] By permission of Mrs. Lanier, and Charles Scribner's Sons, N. Y.

JAMES LANE ALLEN.

JAMES LANE ALLEN is one of the best and most successful of the living writers of the South. He is a Kentuckian, and his sketches and stories have so far all dealt with life in his native State.

WORKS.

Life in the Blue Gra.s.s.

White Cowl.

Flute and Violin, and other stories.

John Gray.

Sister Dolorosa.

A Kentucky Cardinal (1895).

SPORTS OF A KENTUCKY SCHOOL IN 1795.

(_From John Gray, a Kentucky Tale of the Olden Time._[41])

A strange mixture of human life there was in Gray's school. There were the native little Kentuckians, born in the wilderness--the first wild, hardy generation of new people; and there were the little folk from Virginia, from Tennessee, from North Carolina, and from Pennsylvania and other sources, huddled together, some rude, some gentle, and starting out now to be formed into the men and women of the Kentucky that was to be.

They had their strange, sad, heroic games and pastimes, those primitive children under his guidance. Two little girls would be driving the cows home about dusk; three little boys would play Indian and capture them and carry them off; the husbands of the little girls would form a party to the rescue; the prisoners would drop pieces of their dresses along the way; and then at a certain point of the woods--it being the dead of night now, and the little girls being bound to a tree, and the Indians having fallen asleep beside their smouldering camp-fires--the rescuers would rush in, and there would be whoops and shrieks, and the taking of scalps, and a happy return.

Or, some settlement would be shut up in a fort besieged. Days would pa.s.s. The only water was a spring outside the walls, and around this the enemy skulked in the corn and gra.s.s. But the warriors must not perish of thirst. So, with a prayer, a tear, a final embrace, the little women marched out through the gates to the spring, in the very teeth of death, and brought back water in their wooden dinner-buckets.

Or, when the boys would become men with contests of running, and pitching quoits, and wrestling, the girls would play wives and have a quilting in a house of green alder-bushes, or be capped and wrinkled grandmothers sitting beside imaginary spinning-wheels and smoking imaginary pipes.

Sometimes it was not Indian warfare, but civil strife. For one morning as many as three Daniel Boones appeared on the playground at the same moment; and at once there was a fierce battle to ascertain which was the genuine Daniel. This being decided, the spurious Daniels submitted to be the one Simon Kenton, the other General George Rogers Clarke.

This was to be a great day for what he called his cla.s.s in history.

Thirteen years before, and forty miles away, had occurred the most dreadful of all the battles--the disaster of the Blue Licks; and in town were many mothers who yet wept for sons, widows who yet dreamed of young husbands, fallen that beautiful August day beneath the oaks and cedars, or floating down the red-dyed river.

It was this that he had promised to tell them at noon; and a little after twelve o'clock he was standing with them on the bank of the Town Fork, in order to give vividness to his description. This stream flows unseen beneath the streets of the city [Lexington] now, and with scarce current enough to wash out its grimy channels; but then it flashed broad and clear through the long valley which formed the town common--a valley of scattered houses with orchards and corn-fields and patches of cane.

A fine poetic picture he formed as he stood there amid their eager upturned faces, bare-headed under the cool brilliant sky of May, and reciting to them, as a prose-minstrel of the wilderness, the deeds of their fathers.

This Town Fork of the Elkhorn, he said, must represent the Licking River. On that side were the Indians; on this, the pioneers, a crowd of foot and horse. There stretched the ridge of rocks, made bare by the stamping of the buffalo; here was the clay they licked for salt.

In that direction headed the two ravines in which Boone had feared an ambuscade. And thus variously having made ready for battle, and looking down for a moment into the eyes of a freckly impetuous little soul who was the Hotspur of the playground, he repeated the cry of McGary, which had been the signal for attack:

"Let all who are not cowards follow me!"

[Hereupon the soldiers plunged through the river, not seeing the Indians nor even knowing where they were; and in a few minutes they were attacked and completely routed by the Indians who were concealed in the woods and ravines of the other bank, as Boone had feared.

Boone's son was killed, and he himself narrowly escaped by dashing through one of the ravines and swimming the river lower down. The slaughter in the river was great, and the pursuit was continued for twenty miles. Never had Kentucky experienced so fatal a blow as that at the Blue Licks.--L. M.]

FOOTNOTE:

[41] By permission of J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia.

JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS.

~1848=----.~

JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS was born in Eatonton, Georgia, and is a lawyer: but he has devoted much time of late years to literature, and is now one of the editors of the "Atlanta Const.i.tution."

[Ill.u.s.tration: ~Arkansas Industrial University, Fayetteville, Washington County, Ark.~]

His dialect stories of "Uncle Remus" are a faithful reproduction of the popular tales of the old negroes of South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama; for the negro dialect varies in the different States. Mr.

Harris' books have made these tales known in England.

"On the Plantation" is said to be autobiographical; it is a story of a boy's life during the war, well and simply told.

WORKS.

Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings.

Nights with Uncle Remus.

On the Plantation.

Little Mr. Thimblefinger.

Mingo, and other Sketches.

Free Joe, and other Georgian Sketches.

Daddy Jake, the Runaway, and Short Stories Told after Dark.

THE TAR-BABY.

(_From Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings._[42])

"Didn't the fox _never_ catch the rabbit, Uncle Remus?" asked the little boy the next evening.

"He come mighty nigh it, honey, sho's you bawn--Brer Fox did. One day atter Brer Rabbit fool 'im wid dat calamus root, Brer Fox went ter wuk en got 'im some tar, en mix it wid some turkentine, en fix up a contrapshun w'at he call a Tar-Baby, en he tuk dish yer Tar-Baby en he sot 'er in de big road, en den he lay off in de bushes fer to see w'at de news wuz gwineter be. En he didn't hatter wait long, nudder, kaze bimeby here come Brer Rabbit pacin' down de road--lippity-clippity, clippity-lippity--dez ez sa.s.sy ez a jay-bird. Brer Fox, he lay low.

Brer Rabbit come prancin' 'long twel he spy de Tar-Baby, en den he fotch up on his behine legs like he wuz 'stonished. De Tar-Baby, she sot dar, she did, en Brer Fox, he lay low.

"'Mawnin'!' says Brer Rabbit, sezee--'nice wedder dis mawnin',' sezee.