[The office] was a very small affair; the type was old and worn, and the hand-press--a Washington No. 2--had seen considerable service.... He quickly mastered the boxes of the printer's case, and before many days was able to set type swiftly enough to be of considerable help to Mr. Snelson, who was foreman, compositor, and pressman. The one queer feature about the _Countryman_ was the fact that it was the only plantation newspaper that has ever been published, the nearest post-office being nine miles away. It might be supposed that such a newspaper would be a failure; but the _Countryman_ was a success from the start, and at one time it reached a circulation of nearly two thousand copies. The editor was a very original writer. _On the Plantation: a Story of a Georgia Boy's Adventures during the War_ is the record, slightly disguised--Joe Maxwell is Joe Harris, and Hillsborough is Eatonton--of the four years in the boy's life that made of him the Joel Chandler Harris that we know to-day. It was his college course, and it was a marvelously complete one. He became a part of the great plantation; he shared its rude festivities; he came closely in contact with the old-time type of plantation negro; and, more important still, he discovered his employer's great library and was directed in his reading by Mrs. Turner, who took pains with the diffident young lad. In time he became himself a contributor to the paper, secretly at first, then openly with the editor's approval. The end of the war and with it the end of the old plantation régime, ended also the _Countryman_ and sent Harris into wider fields. For a time he worked at Macon, home of Lanier, then at New Orleans, where Cable in the intervals of office work was dreaming over the old French and Spanish records, then for a time he was editor of the Forsyth, Georgia, _Advertiser_. The force and originality of his editorials attracted at length the attention of W. T. Thompson, author of the Georgia classic, _Major Jones's Courtship_, and in 1871 he secured him for his own paper, the _Savannah News_. Five years later, Harris went over to the _Atlanta Constitution_ and during the twenty-five years that followed his life was a vital part of that journal's history.