“A Story of the Old South”—we may be pardoned for a slightly tired feeling on reading those words on the title page of “Bethany,” but the first chapter is reassuring in its sturdy presentation of middle class Georgia life, simple, unpretentious, plain, and absolutely uncolored with the grandeur, so familiar in “befo’ the wah” fiction. It is refreshing to read such passages as these: “We Hortons were a family of middle class farmers. We had never been anything else. We never expected to be anything else. Our condition was good enough for us. We had plenty of land. We had always had it.... Yes; we had prospered; and had always been independent. We were not rich, you understand: just comfortable; with good farms, fat stock, and likely niggers We owed no debts; we had a few hundred of dollars in pocket, ready for an emergency—such as a request for a loan to some friend who might have got into a temporary ‘tight’ by betting on the wrong horse, or by trying to make four queens beat a straight flush.... “So far as we came into touch with the outside world at all, we were indebted to Bethany—a little, one-horse hamlet, where we worshiped and got the mail. Bethany had a granite depot on the Georgia railroad. Bethany had a post office. Bethany had a dry-goods store and two doggeries. Anyone who wished to run a horse race, fight chickens, play poker, or throw ‘chuck-a-luck,’ could do so at Bethany. “The mansion in which we lived was a very modest affair. It did not, in the least, resemble a Grecian temple which had been sent into exile and which was striving, unsuccessfully, to look at ease among corn-cribs, cow-pens, horse-stables, pig-sties, chicken-houses, negro cabins, and worm-fenced cotton fields. It did not perch upon the top of the highest hill for miles around, and browbeat the whole community with its arrogant self-assertion. No; ours was just a plain house and none too large, not built out of bricks brought over from England, but of timbers torn from the heart of the long-leaf Georgia pine.” In this vein Mr. Watson proceeds to give a picture of the plain Georgian and his environment, which has all the charm of personal reminiscence and the weight of historic truth. One feels in reading these simple annals of the Hortons of Georgia that just so they must have lived and not otherwise, and the last paragraph of the first chapter describes for us the effect of Mr. Watson’s portrayal: “It all rises before me complete as a picture, vivid as a flash of lightning—a plain, unpretentious, comfortable, happy Southern home of the old regime—and like a castle among the clouds it is gone forever, even while I gaze; just as the republic of our fathers, of which that old home was a typical part, is gone, forever gone.”