Remus is one of the few distinctly original characters of our national literature; and as the old plantation life recedes more and more into the past, these dialect folk tales of which he is the central figure will prove a valuable heritage to a newer time from a richly picturesque period of Southern history. Interesting as they are simply for the story and the setting, they have, when looked at more deeply, something of moral significance not unlike that of simple allegory. This is confirmed by the author's remark that it is not difficult to find out why the negro "selects as his hero the weakest and most harmless of animals, and brings him out victorious in contests with the bear, the wolf, and the fox: it is not virtue that triumphs, but helplessness; it is not malice, but mischievousness."

Irwin Russell (1853-1879).—Irwin Russell was born in Port Gibson, Mississippi, educated at St. Louis University, studied law and began the practice of it in Mississippi; but being a man of versatile talents and erratic disposition, he neglected the law for newspaper work, music, and literature. His short, pathetic life of twenty-six years ended in New Orleans, where he was connected with The Times. Russell early perceived the literary possibilities of the negro dialect, and he is chiefly remembered to-day as the pioneer in that sort of writing, the immediate predecessor of Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page. His best-known poem is "Christmas Night in the Quarters" (1878). Another popular piece is "Nebuchadnezzar," in which are related a darky's struggles with a mule. Russell was an ardent admirer of Robert Burns and could write very like the Scotch poet. While he wrote a few serious poems of merit, it is his delineation of negro character that will preserve his name; in this he opened a rich new field. Russell was a clever caricaturist and imitator, and was able to sketch faces and scenes with telling effect and to reproduce the styles of various poets. The slender volume of his poems was published in 1888.

MARY NOAILLES MURFREE (1850–)

(Charles Egbert Craddock)

Her Life.-Mary Noailles Murfree was born near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, January 24, 1850, in the old house later celebrated in her novel, Where the Battle was Fought. She came of good North Carolina Revolutionary stock; her father was a successful lawyer of Nashville. In that city and in Philadelphia she was educated. Being lame from her childhood, she could not take part in the usual outdoor sports; she therefore turned to reading fiction for her recreation and fed her imagina

tion on the novels of Scott and George Eliot. For fifteen successive summers the family spent several months in the mountains of East Tennessee, and thus Miss Murfree had abundant opportunity to study the mountaineer at close range in his native fastnesses. In the seventies she had begun writing stories for Appleton's Journal under the penname of "Charles Egbert Craddock" and by 1878 she was contributing to the Atlantic Monthly. For a number of years after the war the Murfree family lived in St. Louis, returning in 1890 to Murfreesboro, which has since been the novelist's home.

Miss Murfree is probably better known as Charles Egbert Craddock; in her earlier efforts she chose thus to disguise her identity because she believed that a man's name would have greater weight with readers and publishers and that, moreover, it might prove a convenient cloak for possible failure. Her attempt at concealment succeeded, for even after it became known that Charles Egbert Craddock was M. N. Murfree, she was still supposed to be a man. To this impression her vigorous style, her extensive knowledge of mountain life, and her masculine hand-writing doubtless contributed. Probably the greatest surprise the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, ever had was on that March morning in 1885 when he stepped into his office and found there a rather small and very refined looking woman who introduced

herself as Charles Egbert Craddock. For years he and his predecessor, William Dean Howells, had been addressing their letters to Charles Egbert Craddock, Esq., or to M. N. Murfree, Esq. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes is reported to have exclaimed after meeting the rising young novelist: "What do you think? Charles Egbert Craddock is below and he's a woman!"

Her Works. The first volume of Miss Murfree's stories, In the Tennessee Mountains, appeared in 1884. This volume contains eight stories on the life and character of the Tennessee mountaineer-the feuds, the fights, the court sessions, the raids. on the moonshiners, neighborhood dances, the love-makings, the lights and shadows of the daily round of an isolated people, shut in by everlasting barriers. There is the somber background of the valley and the sentinel mountain, and over against them there is the belated Anglo-Saxon folk, as picturesque as the encompassing scenery of which they form an integral part. Among them one may find a high sense of honor, despite their lawlessness and general fondness for settling disputes with rifles and pistols. Endurance and sacrifice are not infrequent virtues; from them spring cases of real heroism among this high-spirited people.

In the story called "Drifting Down Lost Creek" the heroine, Cynthia Ware, is a tragic figure in her patient sacrifice for her unfaithful lover, for whose release from prison she has labored. Somehow her disappointed life seemed to find its symbol in the loneliness of the mountain tinged with the fading splendors of an autumn sunset:

The sun had gone down, but the light yet lingered. The evening star trembled above Pine Mountain. Massive and darkling it stood against the red west. How far, ah, how far, stretched that mellow crimson glow, all adown Lost Creek Valley, and over the vast mountain solitudes on either hand! Even the eastern ranges were rich with this legacy of the dead and gone day, and purple and splendid they lay beneath the rising moon. She looked at it with full and shining eyes. "I dunno how he kin make out ter furgit the mountings," she said; and then she went on, hearing the crisp leaves rustling beneath her tread.

He might forget her, but how could he forget the mountains? At last her resignation triumphs, but not without that touch of fatalism which is a part of the mountaineer's religion:

Sometimes, to be sure, it seems to her that the years of her life are like the floating leaves drifting down Lost Creek, valueless and purposeless, and vaguely vanishing in the mountains. Then she remembers that the sequestered subterranean current is charged with its own inscrutable imperative mission, and she ceases to question and regret, and bravely does the work nearest her hand, and has glimpses of its influence in the widening lives of others, and finds in these a placid content.

That passage might have been written by George Eliot, so full is it of self-abnegation and the pathos of buried hopes.

Throughout the stories there are touches that show keen insight into the habits and talk of the mountaineer; as, for instance, the pungent remarks of Old Mis' Cayce on the good old times at the settlement:

"I'member when I war a gal whisky war so cheap that up to the store at the settlemint they'd hav a bucket set full o' whisky an' a gourd, free fur all comers, an' another bucket alongside with water ter season it. An' the way that thar water lasted war surprising'; that it war!”

The pithy comment of the old constable on Clem Sanders's spelling is interesting:

"Sech spellin' as Clem Sanders kin do oughter be agin the law! It air agin every law o' spellin'. Clem ought to be hung a leetle fur each offense. It jes' fixes him in his criminal conduct agin the alphabet."

Among the numerous novels that Miss Murfree has written, those on the mountain folk are the best-The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains (1885), In the Clouds (1886), Down the Ravine (1885), The Despot of Broomsedge Cove (1888), In the Stranger Peoples' Country (1891). She has written on other scenes and other people, but she has not delineated them with the same sure hand that depicted the life of the East Tennessee

mountaineer. This hidden region she discovered for literature, and therein lies her claim to lasting recognition. Past these people, caught as it were in an eddy, the hurrying stream of civilization had swept on; they preserved much of the older speech, many of the older habits of thought. We call them primitive, but that is only a relative way of speaking: their dialect, though a corrupt form, retains familiar old idioms and pronunciations; their songs and ballads are survivals of a transplanted English civilization of three centuries ago; these picturesque folk are "cur contemporary ancestors in the Southern mountains."

At the fortunate moment Charles Egbert Craddock found and portrayed this unchanged people in a kind of folk-epic. In the best of her books she has artistically harmonized the grandeur and vastness of the mountains, with their ineffable poetry of form and color, with the isolated lives of those provincial men and women into an impressive picture. She has therefore rendered a distinctive service to American literature in this unique contribution. As more and more before the oncoming tide of education the mountain type is modified into dull uniformity, Miss Murfree's books, like Cable's on the Creoles and Harris's on the negro, will be valued for the light they throw on an interesting phase of the nation's social history.

JAMES LANE ALLEN (1849-)

His Life. James Lane Allen was born near Lexington, Kentucky, in 1849, and was brought up amid the scenes he afterwards described in his stories. In 1872 he graduated at Transylvania University, Lexington. For a number of years he taught school in Kentucky and Missouri, returning to his alma mater as instructor; he resigned there to become professor of Latin in Bethany College, West Virginia, holding that position two years (1882-'84). By this time he had resolved to make literature his profession; he accordingly settled in New York, after living for a short time in Cincinnati and Washington, in order to be near the periodicals for which he had begun to contribute. His first produc