Tundë" IN CAE He blot att slat & es al sal tudi Ils esilər əldonyi 92911 97A The biography' of Irwin Russell is brief and pathetic. He was undoubtedly ja genius (like Stephen Collins Foster, wayward, unstable, convivial, a skilful banjo player and endowed freely with the temperament that accompanies this humorous and

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education he surpassed Foster: he was a graduate of the Jesking instrument.

studied law, but it was not in his nature to settle down to

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lighted to visit the river boats at Port Gibson, Mississippi, his native town, and in negro melodies to the delight of the captain and the roustabouts Some of his dialect, poems were printed in Scribner's Monthly in 1876, and, encouraged by their reception, he went himself to New York, where he received considerable attention. After a few months, however, he drifted South again, worked for a time on a New Orleans newspaper, and at twenty-six was 'dead in Bohemia' as one poet has expressed it. A thin volume of his poems appeared in 1888. Russell was undoubtedly the pioneer in what proved to be a rich field, for it was he who discovered the literary possibilities of the negro. Thomas Nelson Page dedicated his Befo' de War, 1888,To Irwin Russell, who awoke the first echo'; and Joel Chandler Harris also considered him his master, What he left must be counted only as a few pitiful fragments, but it is enough to show the undoubted genius of the man and to make us regret all the more deeply his untimely end.

The appearance in The Atlantic Monthly, May, 1878, of a story of the great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, signed "Charles: Egbert Craddock,' marks a step in the history of the American short story. The date may be taken as the beginning of the dialect era in American fiction, the era of exploiting strange localities and uncouth personalities. The author of Tennessee mountain stories was Miss Mary N. Murfree, a native of Murfreesboro, Tennes vee, and a summer visitor for many years among the mountains of her native state. The discovery that the mysterious Charles Egbert Craddock was a woman was one of the literary sensations of the eighties and it did much to bring her work to the attention of readers.

Like Thomas Hardy, she has made the scenic background of her stories almost a leading character in the plot. Preeminently is she a writer of fiction of locality, the background always dominates. She has an eye for the picturesque, for the unusual in character and scene, and as a result her characters are always as quaint and unfamiliar as are those of Dickens. Her style is is peculiarly her own, florid often, and over adjectived, but often impressive and in perfect keeping surroundings she describes. She is at her best when describing lonely valleys and remote cabins with the pitiful desolation of human lives stranded in lonesome coves and savage mountain recesses. Ja II obio ob stof grol or sd fhow

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OVER ON THE T'OTHER

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loom.do sb do sulsz 95 2 wdw we Stretching out laterally from a long oblique line of the Southern Alleghanies are two parallel ranges, following the same course through several leagues, and separated by a narrow strip of valley hardly half a mile in width. As they fare along arm in arm, so to speak, sundry differ- 10 ences between the close companions are distinctly apparent. One is much the higher, and leads the way; it strikes out all the bold curves and angles of the course, meekly attended by the lesser 15 ridge; its shadowy coves and sharp ravines are repeated in miniature as its comrade falls into the line of march; it seems to have its companion in charge, and to conduct it away from the majestic 20 procession of mountains that traverses the State.

muffles the voice of the singing pines; and all the crags are hung with gigantic glittering icicles, and the woods are gloomy and bleak. When the sun shines bright on Old Rocky-Top, clouds often hover about the loftier mountain, and storms brew in that higher atmosphere; the allpervading winter winds surge wildly among the groaning forests, and wrench the limbs from the trees, and dash huge fragments of cliffs down deep gorges, and spend their fury before they reach the sheltered lower spur. When the kindly shades of evening slip softly down on drowsy Rocky-Top, and the work is laid by in the rough little houses, and the simple home-folks draw around the hearth, day still lingers in a weird, paralytic life among the tree-tops of the T'other Mounting; and the only remnant of the world visible is that stark black line of its summit, stiff and hard against the faint green and saffron tints of the sky. Before the birds are well awake on Old Rocky-Top. and while the shadows are still thick, the T'other Mounting has been called up to a new day. Lonely dawns these: the pale gleam strikes along the October woods, bringing first into uncertain twilight the dead yellow and red of the foliage, presently heightened into royal gold and crimson by the first ray of sunshine; it rouses

But, despite its more imposing appearance, all the tangible advantages are possessed by its humble neighbor. When Old 25 Rocky-Top, as the lower range is called, is fresh and green with the tender verdure of spring, the snow still lies on the summit of the T'other Mounting, and drifts deep into treacherous rifts and chasms, and 30

1 From In the Tennessee Mountains, copyright by Houghton Mifflin & Co.