De big Owl holler en cry fer his mate, My honey, my love! Oh, don't stay long! oh, don't stay late! My honey, my love! Hit ain't so mighty fur ter de good-by gate, My honey, my love! Whar we all got ter go w'en we sing out de night, My honey, my love! My honey, my love, my heart's delight-- My honey, my love! IV With the success of the first Uncle Remus book there came the greatest flood of dialect literature that America has ever known. The years 1883 and 1884 mark the high tide of this peculiar outbreak, and to Georgia more than to any other locality may be traced the primal cause. In 1883 came what may be called the resurgence of the cracker, that Southeastern variety of the Pike which now came to the North as a new discovery. The leading characteristics of the type were thus set forth by Harris in his story of "Mingo": Slow in manner and speech, shiftless in appearance, hospitable but suspicious toward strangers, unprogressive, toughly enduring the poor, hard conditions of their lives, and oppressed with the melancholy silences of the vast, shaggy mountain solitudes among which they dwell. The women are lank, sallow, dirty. They rub snuff, smoke pipes--even the young girls--and are great at the frying pan; full of a complaining patience and a sullen fidelity. Again America became excited over a new Pike County type. Johnston's _Dukesborough Tales_ were issued for the first time in the North; Harris's "At Teague Poteet's, a Sketch of the Hog Mountain Range," appeared in the June _Century_, and Charles Egbert Craddock's story of the same mountains, "The Harnt that Walks Chilhowee," came out the same month in the _Atlantic_. That was in 1883. The next year appeared Harris's _Mingo_, and Craddock's _In the Tennessee Mountains_. Then the flood gates of dialect were loosened. The _Century_ published Page's story "Mars Chan," which it had been holding for four years, a story told entirely in the negro dialect. The new and mysterious Craddock, who was found now to be Miss Mary N. Murfree, created a widespread sensation. In 1883 appeared James Whitcomb Riley's first book _The Old Swimmin'-Hole and 'Leven More Poems_ and Mary Hallock Foote's _The Led-Horse Claim_; in 1887 came Octave Thanet's _Knitters in the Sun_, dialect tales of the Arkansas canebrakes, and shortly afterwards Hamlin Garland's studies of farm life in the middle West. The eighties stand for the complete triumph of dialect and of local color.