



Produced by Stan Goodman and PG Distributed Proofreaders






SOUTHERN LIGHTS AND SHADOWS

Harper's Novelettes

By Various

Edited By William Dean Howells And Henry Mills Alden

1907



Table of Contents


   Grace MacGowan Cooke
   THE CAPTURE OF ANDY PROUDFOOT

   Abby Meguire Roach
   THE LEVEL OF FORTUNE

   Alice MacGowan
   PAP OVERHOLT

   Mrs. B.F. Mayhew
   IN THE PINY WOODS

   William L. Sheppard
   MY FIFTH IN MAMMY

   Sarah Barnwell Elliott
   AN INCIDENT

   M.E.M. Davis
   A SNIPE HUNT

   J.J. Eakins
   THE COURTSHIP OF COLONEL BILL

   Maurice Thompson
   THE BALANCE OF POWER




INTRODUCTION

The most noticeable characteristic of the extraordinary literary
development of the South since the Civil War is that it is almost entirely
in the direction of realism. A people who, up to that time, had been so
romantic that they wished to naturalize among themselves the ideals and
usages of the Walter Scott ages of chivalry, suddenly dropped all that, and
in their search for literary material could apparently find nothing so good
as the facts of their native life. The more "commonplace" these facts the
better they seemed to like them. Evidently they believed that there was a
poetry under the rude outside of their mountaineers, their slattern country
wives, their shy rustic men and maids, their grotesque humorists, their
wild religionists, even their black freedmen, which was worth more than the
poetastery of the romantic fiction of their fathers. In this strong faith,
which need not have been a conscious creed, the writers of the New South
have given the world sketches and studies and portraits of the persons and
conditions of their peculiar civilization which the Russians themselves
have not excelled in honesty, and hardly in simplicity. To be sure, this
development was on the lines of those early humorists who antedated the
romantic fictionists, and who were often in their humor so rank, so wild,
so savage, so cruel, but the modern realism has refined both upon their
matter and their manner. Some of the most artistic work in the American
short-story, that is to say the best short-story in the world, has been
done in the South, so that one may be reasonably sure of an artistic
pleasure in taking up a Southern story. One finds in the Southern stories
careful and conscientious character, rich local color, and effective
grouping, and at the same time one finds genuine pathos, true humor, noble
feeling, generous sympathy. The range of this work is so great as to
include even pictures of the more conventional life, but mainly the writers
keep to the life which is not conventional, the life of the fields, the
woods, the cabin, the village, the little country town. It would be easier
to undervalue than to overvalue them, as we believe the reader of the
admirable pieces here collected will agree.

W.D.H.




The Capture of Andy Proudfoot


By GRACE MACGOWAN COOKE

A dry branch snapped under Kerry's foot with the report of a toy pistol. He
swore perfunctorily, and gazed greedily at the cave-opening just ahead. He
was a bungling woodsman at best; and now, stalking that greatest of all big
game, man, the blood drummed in his ears and his heart seemed to slip a cog
or two