Together with Armistead C. Gordon of Staunton, Virginia, he wrote other ballads and poetical studies which were issued as a joint volume a decade later with the title _Befo' de War, Echoes in Negro Dialect_. But in the meantime he had been experimenting with prose dialect, and late in the seventies he submitted to the magazine a long story told wholly in the negro vernacular. It was a bold venture: even _Scribner's_ hesitated. They might print humorous dialect poems and Macon's "Aphorisms from the Quarters" in their "Bric-à-Brac" department, but a serious story all of it in a dialect that changed many words almost beyond recognition--they held it for over four years. When it did appear, however, as "Marse Chan" in 1884, it seemed that their fears had been groundless. It was everywhere hailed as a masterpiece. "Unc' Edinburg's Drowndin'," "Meh Lady," and others quickly followed, and in 1887 the series was issued as a collection with the title _In Ole Virginia_, a book that is to Page what _The Luck of Roaring Camp_ is to Harte and _Old Creole Days_ is to Cable. The method of Page in these early stories was original. The phrase "befo' de war" explains it. He would reproduce the atmosphere of the old South, or what is more nearly the truth, the atmosphere of aristocratic old Virginia plantation life. "No doubt the phrase 'Before the war' is at times somewhat abused. It is just possible that there is a certain Caleb Balderstonism in the speech at times. But for those who knew the old county as it was then, and contrast it with what it has become since, no wonder it seems that even the moonlight was richer and mellower 'before the war' than it is now. For one thing, the moonlight as well as the sunlight shines brighter in our youth than in maturer age."[123] But Page expressed the phrase in negro dialect--"befo' de war." The story of the vanished era, the gallantry and spirit of its men, the beauty of its women, the nameless glow that hovers over remembered youthful days, he would show through the medium of the negro. It is exquisite art done with seemingly impossible materials. An old slave tells the story in his own picturesque way and wholly from his own viewpoint, yet so simply, so inevitably, that one forgets the art and surrenders oneself as one surrenders to actual life with its humor and its pathos and its tragedy. It is romance--an idealized world, and an idealized negro. Surely no freed slave ever told a consecutive tale like that, perfect in its proportions and faultless in its lights and shadows, yet such a criticism never for a moment occurs to the reader. The illusion is complete. The old South lives again and we are in it both in sympathy and comprehension.