rusticity at its freest.

One of a small community of superannuated pensioners upon the bounty of
their former owners, Daddy was easily first citizen of Evergreen annex
on Crepe Myrtle plantation, which is to say he was therein a personage
of place and of privilege, coming and going at will, doing as he
pleased, and as, with uplifted eye, he reverently boasted, "sponsible to
nobody but Almighty Gord for manners and behavior."

Even so late as this year of grace, a full half century after
"emancipation," there are still to be found on many of the larger
plantations in the far South a few such members of the order of the
Rocking-chair, whose records of "good and honorable service" reach back
through periods of bondage, even such kindergartners as septuagenarians
in the privileged class, having clear title to nearly a quarter of a
century of slave memories; not to mention the occasional centenarian
with even his semi-occasional uncle or father poking around, toothless
and white-plumed dignitaries, these, sometimes with leaders, being
blind, but ever important in pride of association and memory.

It is something even if one is bent double and may never again behold
the light of day, to be able to reach back into a dim and forgotten past
and to say, "I remember," especially when the memory recalls days of
brilliance and of importance.

But Daddy's place among the gentle Knights and Ladies of the
Rocking-chair was far and away above such as these whose thoughts, alert
though they were and loyal, travelled forever backward to the sweet but
worn fields of memory where every pleasure is a recognition and fashions
do not change--a restful retreat for dreamers whose days of activity are
done.

But Daddy's mind worked forward and upward and although he did not know
the alphabet excepting by rote, a common ante-bellum plantation
accomplishment, and while professing high contempt for what he called
"cold shelf-knowledge," his reputation for wisdom, wisdom as gleaned in
observation and experience and "ripened by insight," was supreme, while
his way of casually tossing it off in bits in playful epigram finally
gave the word its plural form so that the expression "Do-Funny Wisdoms"
came into familiar use.

As an example of his rambling talk, much of which seems at least
semivagarious on transcription, I recall one of his meandering
dissertations on the value of experience as superior to observation.

Several of the old people,