RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON

(1822-1898)

NE of the most distinctive and pleasant features of American

literature in its development since 1870 has been the work of Southern writers. They have portrayed in sketch, poem, and story,-notably in the latter form,-the scenes, types, and natural beauties of a picturesque and romantic part of the United States, rich in colors and flavors of its own, and a most hopeful field for literary cultivation. Different authors, men and women, have drawn with sympathetic insight the characters peculiar to their own sections or States, and a product of originality and value has been the result. To mention but a few names: Mr. Page and Mrs. Stuart have done this for Virginia and Alabama, Miss Murfree for Tennessee, "Octave Thanet" for the Southwest, Mr. James Lane Allen for Kentucky, and Messrs. Harris and Johnston for Georgia. The last mentioned, R. M. Johnston, holds an honorable place amid the elder authors of the South because of his lively, humorously unctuous, and truthfully limned studies of Georgia folk.

RICHARD M. JOHNSTON

Richard Malcolm Johnston was born in 1822 in Hancock County, Georgia, and was graduated from Mercer University in that State in 1841. He was admitted to the bar, and practiced his profession at Sparta, Georgia; but like the legion before him who have felt themselves called to scholarship and literature, he turned from the law, declining such a substantial bait as a judgeship, and in 1857 became professor of belles-lettres in the University of Georgia, holding the position until the breaking out of the war in 1861. Afterwards he opened a select classical school at Rockby, in his native county, and it became a noted institution in the South. In 1867 the school was moved to the suburbs of Baltimore; and after its abandonment Colonel Johnston resided in that city, where he died September 23, 1898. The stories which gave him reputation, 'The Dukesborough Tales,' first appeared in the old Southern Magazine, and were published later in book form (1871). Some time before, he had printed his 'Georgia Sketches: By an Old Man' (1864). In 1884 came 'Old Mark Langston:

A Tale of Duke's Creek'; in 1885 Two Grey Tourists'; 'Mr. Absalom Billingslea and Other Georgia Folk' dates from 1888; Ogeechee Cross-Firings from 1889; and still later books of fiction are 'Widow Guthrie (1890); The Primes and their Neighbors,' 'Mr. Fortner's Marital Claims' (1892); Mr. Billy Downs and his Likes' (1892); and 'Little Ike Templin and Other Stories' (1894). Colonel Johnston had also written a biography of Alexander H. Stephens, a sketch of English literature (in collaboration with Professor William Hand Browne), and several volumes of essays.

Colonel Johnston's representative work is found in the 'Dukesborough Tales.' All his later fiction bears a family resemblance to this inimitable series, in which is reproduced the old-time Georgian country life among white folks from a supposed contemporary's coign of vantage, and in a way to give the reader a vivid sense of local custom, tradition, and trait. The sly fun of these genial stories is delicious; the revelations of human nature are keen, while the temper is kindly and tolerant. Johnston did for the white people of a certain period and section what Page and Harris do for the negroes; and he done it once and for all.

THE EARLY MAJORITY OF MR. THOMAS WATTS Copyright 1883, by Harper & Brothers. Reprinted by permission of the author

ITTLE Tom Watts, as he used to be called before the unex

Lpected developments which I propose briefly to narrate, was

the second in a family of eight children, his sister Susan being the eldest. His parents dwelt in a small house situate on the edge of Dukesborough. Mr. Simon Watts, though of extremely limited means, had some ambition. He held the office of constable in that militia district, and in seasons favorable to law business made about fifty dollars a year. The outside world seemed to think it was a pity that the head of a family so large and continually increasing should so persistently prefer mere fame to the competency which would have followed upon his staying at home and working his little field of very good ground. But he used to contend that a man could not be expected to live always, and therefore he ought to try to live in such a way as to leave his family, if nothing else, a name that they wouldn't be ashamed to hear mentioned after he was gone.

Yet Mr. Watts was not a cheerful man. Proud as he might justly feel in his official position, it went hard with him to be compelled to live in a way more and more pinched as his family continued to multiply with astonishing rapidity. His spirits, naturally saturnine, grew worse and worse with every fresh arrival in the person of a baby, until the eighth. Being yet a young man, comparatively speaking, and being used to make calculations, the figures seemed too large as he looked to the future. I would not go so far as to say that this prospect actually killed him; but at any rate he took a sickness which the doctor could not manage, and then Mr. Watts gave up his office and everything else that he had in this world.

But Mrs. Watts, his widow, had as good a resolution as any other woman in her circumstances ever had. She had no notion of giving up in that way. She gave up her husband, it is true, but that could not be helped; and without making much ado about even that, she kept going at all sorts of work, and somehow she got along at least as well after as before the death of Mr. Simon.

A person not well acquainted with the brood of little Wattses often found difficulty in discriminating among them. I used to observe them with considerable interest as I went into Dukes

borough occasionally, with one or the other or both of my parents. They all had white hair, and red chubby faces. It was long a matter of doubt what was their sex. Such was the rapidity of their succession, and so graduated the declivity from Susan downwards, that the mother used to cut all their garments after a fashion that was very general, in order that they might descend during the process of decay to as many of them as possible. Now, although I saw them right often, I had believed for several months, for instance, that little Jack was a girl, from a yellow frock that had belonged to his sister Mary Jane, but which little Jack wore until his legs became subjected to such exposure that it had to descend to Polly Ann, his next younger sister. Then I made a similar mistake about Polly Ann, who during this time had worn little Jack's breeches, out of which he had gone into Mary Jane's frock; and I thought on my soul that Polly Ann was a boy.

In regard to Tommy, not only I, but the whole public, had been in a state of uncertainty in this behalf for a great length of time. Having no older brother, and Susan's outgrown dresses

being alone available, his male wardrobe was inevitably only half as extensive and various as by good rights, generally speaking, it ought to have been. Therefore Tommy had to make his appearance alternately in frock and breeches, according to the varying conditions of these garments, for a period that annoyed him the more the longer it extended, and finally began to disgust. Tom eagerly wished that he could outgrow Susan, and thus get into breeches out and out. But Susan in this respect, as indeed in almost all others, kept her distance in the lead. There was a difference, easily noticeable, in Tom's deportment. in these seasons. While in frocks it was subdued, retiring, and if not melancholy, at least fretful. Curiosity perhaps, or some other motive equally powerful, might and indeed sometimes did lead him outside of the gate; but never to linger there for any great length of time. If he had to go upon an errand during that season (a necessity which that resolute woman his mother enforced without the slightest hesitation), he went and returned with speed. Yet before starting out on such occasions, he was wont to be careful to give his hair such a turn that his manly head might refute the lie which Susan's frock had told. For it is probable that there have been few, if indeed any, boys who were more unwilling either to be or to be considered of the opposite sex, than that same Tom Watts. I do not remember ever to have seen a boy whose hair had so high and peculiar a roach as his exhibited, especially when he wore his sister Susan's frocks. Instead of being parted in the middle, it was divided into three parts. It was combed perfectly straight down on the sides of his head, and perfectly straight up from the top. An immense distance was thus established between the extremities of any two hairs which receded contiguously to each other on the border-lines.

All this was an artful attempt to divert public attention from the frock which intimated the female, to the head which asserted and which was supposed to establish the male. He once said to Susan:

"When they sees your old frock, they makes out like that they 'spicions me a gal; but when they looks at my har all roached up, then they knows who I am."

"Yes indeed," answered Susan, "and a sight you air. Goodness knows, I'd rather be a girl, and rather look like one if I weren't, than to look like you do in that fix."

But it was during the other season, that which he called his breeches week, that Tommy Watts was most himself. In this period he was cheerful, bold, notorious. He was as often upon the street as he could find opportunities to steal away from home; and while there, he was as evidently a boy as was to be found in Dukesborough or any other place of its size. In this happy

season he seemed to be disposed to make up as far as possible for the confinements and the gloominesses of the other. So much so, indeed, that he had to be whipped time and time again for his unlicensed wanderings; and for many other pranks which are indeed common to persons of his age and sex, but which he seemed to have the greater temptation to do, and which he did with more zest and temerity than other boys, because he had only half their time in which to do them. Tom Watts maintained that if a boy was a boy, then he ought to be a boy; and as for himself, if he had to be a girl a part of the time, he meant to double on them for the balance. By them he meant his mammy, as he was wont to call his surviving parent. But she understood the method of doubling as well as he; for while she whipped him with that amount of good-will which in her judgment was proper, she not unfrequently cut short his gay career by reducing him to Susan's frock, or (if it was not ready for the occasion) to his own single shirt. On such occasions he would relapse at once into the old melancholy ways. If Thomas Watts had been familiar with classical history, I have not a doubt that in these periods of his humiliation he would have compared his case with that of the great Achilles, whose mother had kept him in inglorious seclusion amid the daughters of Lycomedes. Yet, like that hero further in being extremely imprudent, no sooner would he recover his male attire than he would seem to think that no laws had ever been made for him, and he would rush headlong into difficulties and meet their consequences. Tom, as his mother used to say, was a boy of a "tremenjuous sperrit." But it had come from her, and enough had been left in her for all domestic purposes. In every hand-to-hand encounter between the two, Thomas was forced to yield and make terms; but he resolved over and over, and communicated that resolution to many persons, that if he ever did obtain his liberty, the world should hear from him. His late father having been to a degree connected, as we remember, with the legal profession, Tom had learned one item (and that was probably the only one that he did learn sufficiently well

XIV-521