What My Lover Said
Jones replied promptly, “else I should never have had the audacity to claim it as my own. Passionately fond of poetry, I scribbled from my earliest recollection, publishing but little, as I wrote only for my own amusement, shyly concealing my penchant for verse and usually selecting a far-off paper for publication, and unfortunately, with the innocence and thoughtlessness of youth, sent the poetical waif to an anti-southern paper. Several northern sages having so long monopolized it of course will not admit that the true author was a little rebel lassie ‘Way Down South in Dixie.’”
To any one familiar with the literature of such controversies, this letter would have been all-revealing, for it is the invariable boast of literary impostors that, scorning the commercial side of literature, they never write for publication, but only for their own amusement. Even to Mr. Boyd the letter left something to be desired, so he wrote again, asking for further details and enclosing a copy of a letter from Mr. Homer Greene telling when and where he had written and published the poem, and stating that this latest development of the controversy rather amused him. This brought forth a long reply from the southern song-bird, of which only a part need be quoted.
“Would that my fiery southern blood,” she writes, “flowed as icily regularly as Mr.
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