It is natural that Mr. Harris’s home should be simple, and call for little elaborate description. He was born and brought up among simple, sincere people, whose wants were few, whose tastes were easily satisfied, whose lives were natural and untainted by any such influences as make for cerebral hyperæmia, or other neurasthenic complaints incidental, as Dr. Hammond says, to modern city life. The village of Eatonton, in Middle Georgia, was Mr. Harris’s birth-place. Since Mr. Henry Watterson, in his book on Southern humor, and other writers, have made Mr. Harris an older man than he really is, it is well to state, as “official,” that he was born on the 9th of December, 1848. Eatonton is a small town now, but it was smaller then. It was surrounded by plantations, and on one of these Mr. Harris spent his earliest years as other Southern children do. At six he began to read. Among the first of his literary acquaintances was the delightful “Vicar of Wakefield.” The boy’s schooling was such as reading the best of the authors of the periods of Queen Anne and the Georges, and a few terms at the Eatonton Academy, could give. He read his text-books, but was bitterly opposed to getting them by heart. When he was about twelve years old an incident occurred which shaped his whole life. The Eatonton postmaster kept a sort of general store--the “country store” of New England,--and its frequenters were at liberty to read the copies of the Milledgeville and other rural papers which were taken by subscribers. In one of these, _The Countryman_, young Harris found that it was edited by a Mr. Turner, whose acquaintance he had made not very long before, and he thrilled with the thought that he knew a real editor. Finding that a boy was wanted he wrote for the place, secured it, and soon learned all that was to be gathered in so small an office. In addition to this acquirement of knowledge, by the permission of Mr. Turner, he had access to a library of three thousand volumes, which he read under the judicious guidance of their owner. Among these books he lived for several years in the very heart of the agricultural region, and he pondered over his reading to the music of the clicking types, with the scamper of the cat-squirrels over the roof and the patter of the acorns dropped by the jay-birds. For amusement he hunted rabbits with a pack of half-bred harriers, or listened to the tales of the plantation Negro, who was there to be found in primitive perfection of type. It was on the Turner plantation that the original Uncle Remus told his stories to the little boy. So it was that he absorbed the wonderfully complete stores of knowledge of the Negro which have since given him fame. He heard the Negro’s stories and enjoyed them, observed his characteristics and appreciated them. Time went on. The printer boy set type, read books, hunted rabbits, ’possums, and foxes, was seized with an ambition to write, and had begun to do so when Sherman’s army