Whar have you been for the last three year
That you haven't heard folks tell

How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks
The night of the Prairie Belle ?

He weren't no saint,-them engineers
Is all pretty much alike,-
One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill
And another one here, in Pike;
A keerless man in his talk was Jim,
And an awkward hand in a row,
But he never flunked, and he never lied,—
I reckon he never knowed how.

And this was all the religion he had,

To treat his engine well;

Never be passed on the river;

To mind the pilot's bell;

And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire,—
A thousand times he swore,
He'd hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last soul got ashore.

All boats has their day on the Mississip,
And her day come at last,-

The Movastar was a better boat,

But the Belle she wouldn't be passed. And so she come tearin' along that nightThe oldest craft on the line

With a nigger squat on her safety-valve,

And her furnace crammed, rosin and pine.

The fire bust out as she clared the bar,
And burnt a hole in the night,

And quick as a flash she turned, and made
For that willer-bank on the right.

There was runnin' and cursin', but Jim yelled out,
Over all the infernal roar:

"I'll hold her nozzle agin the bank

Till the last galoot's ashore."

Through the hot, black breath of the burnin' boat
Jim Bludso's voice was heard,

And they all had trust in his cussedness,
And knowed he would keep his word.
And, sure's you're born, they all got off
Afore the smokestacks fell,-

And Bludso's ghost went up alone
In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.

He weren't no saint, but at jedgment
I'd run my chance with Jim,
'Longside of some pious gentlemen

That wouldn't shook hands with him.
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,-
And went for it thar and then;

And Christ ain't a-goin' to be too hard
On a man that died for men.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. FOR FURTHER ILLUSTRATION

Dickinson, E.: Morning.

A Book. With Flowers.

Called Back.

Hay, John: Pike County Ballads.

Lanier, S.: Hymns of the Marshes.

The Symphony.

Corn.

Lazarus, E.: The Banner of the Jew.

The New Ezekiel.

Scudder, H. E.: American Poetry.

Sill, E. R.: Before Sunrise in Winter.
Stoddard, R. H.: Wind and Rain.

The Country Life.

The Flight of Youth.

Weber, W. F.: Selections from the Southern Poets. (Macmillan

Pocket Classics.)

Whitman, W.: When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed. Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.

II. FOR COLLATERAL READING

Gosse, E.: Walt Whitman.

(In Critical Kit-Cats.)

Link, S. A.: Pioneers of Southern Literature.

Mims, E.: Life of Sidney Lanier.

Pickett, La Salle Corbett: Literary Hearthstones of Dixie.

CHAPTER V

LATER AND PRESENT-DAY WRITERS

I. Prose-Fiction

The death of the last of the great men who had made New England and through New England, America—a factor to be reckoned with in the literary world, ushers in the day of our literary expansion. Though Mr. Brander Matthews tells us that New York City has once more become the literary centre of America, it is in no sense the literary centre as it was in the days of Irving, or as Cambridge and Boston were in the days of Longfellow and Lowell. To-day there are small local literary centres all over the United States. We find them scattered through the Middle West from one university town to another; from the Pacific coast to the Lake region; from the lakes to the Atlantic coast.

The following selection of representative writers shows how impossible it would be for any one section to hold a monopoly of our literary output to-day. The choice is typical but by no means exhaustive.

I. S. Weir Mitchell (1830-1914) was a physician of Philadelphia who became well known for his novels, the best of which is Hugh Wynne. "This," declares Professor Barrett Wendell, "is so accurate and vivid a fiction as to have the value of an authority."

HUGH'S SCHOOL DAYS.

(From Hugh Wynne: Free Quaker, Chapter II)

The day I went to school for the first time is very clear in my memory. I can see myself, a stout little fellow

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about eight years old, clad in gray homespun, with breeches, low shoes, and a low, flat beaver hat. I can hear my mother say, "Here are two big apples for thy master," it being the custom so to propitiate pedagogues. Often afterward I took eggs in a little basket, or flowers, and others did the like.

"Now run! run!" she cried, "and be a good boy; run, or thou wilt be late." And she clapped her hands as I sped away, now and then looking back over my shoulder.

I remember as well my return home to this solid house, this first day of my going to school. One is apt to associate events with persons, and my mother stood leaning on the half-door as I came running back. She was some little reassured to see me smiling, for, to tell the truth, I had been mightily scared at my new venture.

As I came she set those large, childlike eyes on me, and opening the lower half-door, cried out:

"I could scarce wait for thee! I wish I could have gone with thee, Hugh; and was it dreadful? Come, let us see thy little book. And did they praise thy reading? Didst thou tell them I taught thee? There are girls, I hear," and so on a way she had of asking many questions without waiting for a reply.

As we chatted we passed through the hall, where tall mahogany chairs stood dark against the white-washed walls, such as were in all the rooms. Joyous at escape from school, and its confinement of three long, weary hours, from eight to eleven, I dropped my mother's hand, and, running a little, slid down the long entry over the thinly sanded floor, and then slipping, came down with a rueful countenance, as nature, foreseeing results, meant that a boy should descend when his legs fail him. My mother sat down on a settle, and spread out both palms toward me, laughing, and crying out:

"So near are joy and grief, my friends, in this world of sorrow."

This was said so exactly with the voice and manner of a famous preacher of our Meeting that even I, a lad then of only eight years, recognised the imitation. Indeed, she