Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His PeopleCobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
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Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People
Cobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
Kentucky -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, American
The narrow wooden sidewalks began to creak and chum under the tread of
many feet. A long-haired medicine doctor emerged from his frock-coat
like a locust coming out of its shell, pushed his high hat off his
forehead and ranged a guitar, sundry bottles of a potent mixture, his
tooth-pulling forceps, and a trick-handkerchief upon the narrow shelf
of his stand alongside the Drummers' Home Hotel. In front of the little
dingy tent of the Half Man and Half Horse a yellow negro sat on a
split-bottom chair limbering up for a hard day. This yellow negro was an
artist. He played a common twenty-cent mouth organ, using his left hand
to slide it back and forth across his spread lips. The other hand held a
pair of polished beef bones, such as end men wield, and about the wrist
was buckled a broad leather strap with three big sleigh-bells riveted
loosely to the leather, so that he could clap the bones and shake the
bells with the same motion. He was a whole orchestra in himself. He
could play on his mouth organ almost any tune you wanted, and with his
bones and his bells to help out he could creditably imitate a church
organ, a fife-and-drum corps, or, indeed, a full brass band. He had
his chair tilted back until his woolly head dented a draggled banner
depicting in five faded primary colon the physical attractions of the
Half Man and Half Horse--Marvel of the Century--and he tested his mouth
organ with short, mellow, tentative blasts as he waited until the Marvel
and the Marvel's manager finished a belated breakfast within and the
first ballyhoo could start. He was practicing the newest of the ragtime
airs to get that far South. The name of it was The Georgia Camp-Meeting.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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