CONTENTS
III. FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS REWARD
VI. WHEN THE FIGHTING WAS GOOD
AFTER I came North to live it seemed to me, as probably it has seemed tomany Southern born men and women that the Southerner of fiction as metwith in the North was generally just that—fiction—and nothingelse; that in the main he was a figment of the drama and of the storybook; a type that had no just claim on existence and yet a type that wascurrently accepted as a verity.
From well meaning persons who apparently wished to convey an impliedcompliment for the southern part of this republic I was forever hearing of“southern pride” and “hot southern blood” and “old southern families,” these matters being mentioned always with a special emphasis which seemedto betray a profound conviction on the part of the speakers that there wasa certain physical, tangible, measurable distinction between, say, thepride of a Southerner and the blood-temperature of a Southerner and thepride and blood heat of a man whose parents had chosen some other part ofthe United States as a suitable place for him to be born in. Had thesepersons spoken of things which I knew to be a part and parcel of theSoutherner's nature—such things for example as his love for his ownstate and his honest veneration for the records made by men of southernbirth and southern blood in the Civil War—I might have understoodthem. But seemingly they had never heard of those matters.
I also discovered or thought I discovered that as a rule the Southerner asseen on the stage or found between the covers of a book or a magazine wasdrawn from a more or less imaginary top stratum of southern life, or elsefrom a bottom-most stratum—either he purported to be an elderly,un-reconstructed, high-tempered gentleman of highly aristocratictendencies residing in a feudal state of shabby grandeur and proud povertyon a plantation gone to seed; or he purported to be a pure white of thepoorest. With a few exceptions the playwright and the story writers werenot taking into account sundry millions of southern born people who wereneither venerable and fiery colonels with frayed wrist bands and limpcollars, nor yet were they snuffdipping, ginseng-digging clay-eaters, butjust such folk as allowing for certain temperamental differences—createdby climate and soil and tradition and by two other main contributingcau