At the opening of the Civil War Page was eight years old. During the years of conflict his home, one of the great plantations of Virginia, was a center of Confederate activities, and time and again the region about it was overrun by the invading armies. It was a marvelous training for the future novelist. He had been born at precisely the right moment. He had been a part of the old régime during the early impressionable years that are golden in a life, the years that color and direct the imagination in all its future workings, and he was young enough when the era closed to adapt himself to the new order. At the close of the war he studied the classics with his father, a scholar of the old Southern type, took the course in the Virginia university presided over by Robert E. Lee, studied law at the University of Virginia, and then from 1875 to 1893 practised law in Richmond. These are the essentials of his biography. It was while he was establishing himself in his profession at the old capital of the Confederacy that he did his first literary work. _Scribner's Monthly_ had heard from the ruined South the first murmurings of a new literature and was giving it every encouragement. It had published King's series of articles on _The Great South_, it had discovered Cable in 1873, it had encouraged Lanier, and in January, 1876, it had begun to issue a series of negro dialect poems by Irwin Russell, a native of Port Gibson, Mississippi, poems that undoubtedly had been suggested by the Pike balladry, and yet were so fresh and original in material and manner that they in turn became a strong influence on their times. That the poems launched Page in his literary career he has freely admitted. Personally I owe much to him. It was the light of his genius shining through his dialect poems--first of dialect poems then and still first--that led my feet in the direction I have since tried to follow. Had he but lived, we should have had proof of what might be done with true negro dialect; the complement of "Uncle Remus."[122] In April, 1877, came his first contribution to _Scribner's_, "Uncle Gabe's White Folks," a dialect poem of the Russell order, yet one that strikes the keynote of all its author's later work: Fine ole place? Yes, sah, 't is so; An' mighty fine people my white folks war-- But you ought ter 'a' seen it years ago, When de Marster an' de Mistis lived up dyah; When de niggers 'd stan' all roun' de do', Like grains o' corn on de cornhouse flo'.