Part 6 (2/2)

Pickett--and that I should like very much to see him.”

”If you are a lady, and Mrs. Pickett, I fear that he will vanish and never be found again.”

Notwithstanding the discouragements, I was permitted to call that afternoon in the hope that the obdurate Uncle Remus might graciously consent to see me. I found him in his office in the top story of the building, an appropriate place to avoid being run to covert by the public, but inconvenient because of the embarra.s.sment which might result from dropping out of the window if he should have the misfortune to be cornered. To say that I was received might be throwing too much of a glamour over the situation. At least, I was not summarily ejected, nor treated to a dissolving view of Uncle Remus disappearing in the distance, so I considered myself fortunate. I told him that I had called up by telephone that morning to speak to him.

”I never talk through the telephone,” he said. ”I do not like to talk in a hole. I look into a man's eyes when I talk to him.”

When Uncle Remus was fairly run to earth and could not escape, he was quite human in his att.i.tude toward his caller; his only fault being that he was p.r.o.ne to talk of his visitor's work rather than his own, and a question that would seem to lead up to any personal revelation on his part would result in so strong an indication of a desire for flight that the conversation would be directed long distances away from Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby. He was a born story-teller, and had not the made author's owl-like propensity to perch upon high places and hoot his wisdom to the pa.s.sing crowd. The expression ”literary” as applied to him filled him with surprise. He called himself an ”accidental author”; said he had never had an opportunity of acquiring style, and probably should not have taken advantage of it if he had. He was always as much astonished by his success as other people are by their failures.

I met him once at a Confederate reunion in Atlanta, where I took my little grand-children, who had been brought up on Uncle Remus, to see him. Having heard their beauty praised, he cautioned them not to think too much of their looks, telling them that appearance was of little consequence. He gave each of them a coin, saying, ”I don't believe in giving money to boys; I believe in their working for it.”

”Well,” said little George, ”haven't we earned it listening to Uncle Remus?”

”If that is so, I'm afraid I haven't money enough to pay you what I owe you.”

He was at ease and natural and like other people with children. He invited them to come to his farm and see the flowers and trees, telling them how his home received the name of ”The Wren's Nest.” As he sat one morning on the veranda, he saw a wren building a nest on his letter-box by the gate. When the postman came he went out and asked him to deliver the mail at the door, to avoid disturbing Madam Wren's preparations for housekeeping. The postman was faithful, and the Wren family had a prosperous and happy home.

”You must never steal an egg from a nest,” he told the boys. Curving one hand into an imitation nest holding an imaginary egg, he hovered over it with the other hand, rubbing it gently, explaining to the boys, who watched him with absorbing interest, how the egg would change to a beautiful fluff of feathers and music, and after a while would fly away among the trees and fill the woods with sweet sounds.

”If you destroy the egg, you kill all that beauty and music, and there will be no little bird to sit on the tree and sing to you.” The boys a.s.sured him that they had never taken an egg, nor even so much as looked into the nest, because some birds will leave their nests if you just look into them.

At the reception given to Mrs. Jackson, Mrs. Stuart, Winnie Davis, and myself, Mr. Harris was invited to stand in line, but declined. It would be difficult to imagine him as standing with a receiving party, shaking hands with the public. He was asked to speak, but that was even less to be expected. The nearest he ever came to making a speech was once when he sat upon the platform while his friend, Henry O.

Grady, was addressing a large a.s.semblage with all that eloquence for which he was noted. When he had finished, the call for ”Harris” came with great volume and persistency. He arose and said, ”I am coming,”

walked down from the platform and was lost in the crowd.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS At Home]

Uncle Remus wrote his stories at ”Snap Bean Farm,” in West End, a suburb of Atlanta. They filled his evenings with pleasure after the office grind was over. If no one but himself had ever seen them, he would have been as happy in the work as he was when the public was delighting in the adventures of Br'er Wolf and Br'er B'ar. In that cosy home the early evening was given to the children, and the later hours to recording the tales which had amused them through the twilight.

A home it was, not only to him but to all who came in friends.h.i.+p to see him in his quiet retreat. There was no room in it for those whom curiosity brought there to see the man of letters or to do honor to a lion. The lionizing of Uncle Remus was the one ambition impossible of achievement in the literary world. For everything else that touched upon the human, the vine-embowered, tree-shaded house on Gordon Street opened hospitable doors.

Joel Chandler Harris was born in Eatonton, the county-seat of Putnam County, Georgia, and in his early days attended the Eatonton Academy, where he received all the academic training he ever had. His vitally helpful education was gained in the wider and deeper school of life, and few have been graduated therefrom with greater honors.

At six years of age he had the good fortune to encounter ”The Vicar of Wakefield,” than whom, it is safe to a.s.sert, no boy of such tender years had ever a better and more inspiring friend. This beloved clerical gentleman led young Joel into a charmed land of literature, in which he dwelt all his life.

In the post-office at Eatonton was an old green sofa, very much the worse for wear, which yet offered a comfortable lounging place for the boy Joel, adapted to his kittenish taste for curling up in quiet retreats. There he would spend hours in reading the newspapers that came to the office. In one of them he found an announcement of a new periodical to be published by Colonel Turner on his plantation nine miles from Eatonton. In connection with this announcement was an advertis.e.m.e.nt for an office boy. It occurred to the future ”Uncle Remus,” then twelve years old, that this might open a way for him. He wrote to Colonel Turner, and a few days later the Colonel drove up to town to take the unknown boy to his plantation. So beside the editor Joel Chandler Harris rode to the office of the _Countryman_ and to his happy destiny. It has been said that but for the Turner plantation there would have been no Uncle Remus, but what would have become of the possibilities of that good old darky if the little Joel had not enjoyed the acquaintance of a good-natured post-master who permitted him to occupy the old green sofa and browse among the second-cla.s.s mail of the Eatonton community?

Surely there was never a better school for the development of a budding author than the office of the _Countryman_, and the well-selected library in the home of its editor, and the great wildwood that environed the plantation.

Best of all, there were the ”quarters,” where ”Uncle Remus” conducted a whole university of history and zoology and philosophy and ethics and laughter and tears. Down in the cabins at night the printer's boy would sit and drink in such stores of wit and wisdom as could not lie unexpressed in his facile mind, and the world is the richer for every moment he spent in that primitive, child-mind community, with its ancient traditions that made it one with the beginning of time.

At times he joined a 'c.o.o.n hunt, and with a gang of boys and a pack of hounds chased the elusive little animal through the night, returning home triumphant in the dawn. He hunted rabbits in the woods, and, maybe, became acquainted with the character of the original Br'er Rabbit from his descendants in the old plantation forest.

From the window near which his type-case stood he saw the squirrels scampering over trees and roofs, heard the birds singing in the branches, caught dissolving views of Br'er Fox flitting across the garden path, and breathed in beauty and romance to be exhaled later for the enchantment of a world of readers.

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