Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 41598-h.htm or 41598-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41598/41598-h/41598-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41598/41598-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See http://archive.org/details/bypathsindixiefo00cockrich BYPATHS IN DIXIE [Illustration: "DES LIKE SHE RUB'IN ON YORN."] BYPATHS IN DIXIE Folk Tales of the South by SARAH JOHNSON COCKE With an Introduction by Harry Stillwell Edwards New York E·P·Dutton & Company 31 West Twenty-Third Street Copyright, 1911 By E. P. Dutton & Company Reprinted, May, 1912 TO MY HUSBAND INTRODUCTION When Thomas Nelson Page began his stories of the old South in the early "Eighties," the reading people of America suddenly aroused to the realization that a vein of virgin gold had been uncovered. There was a rush to the new field and almost every Southerner who had a story to tell told it, many of them with astonishing dramatic force and power. As by magic a new department was added to American literature and a score of new writers won their way to fame. From a notably backward section, in point of expression, the South stepped easily, with the short story, into the front rank and has held her place ever since. The field once entered was explored faithfully, the eager minds of her sons and daughters running through the Ante-Bellum, Revolutionary and Colonial eras, and when Joel Chandler Harris developed the "Brer Rabbit" stories, "The Little Boy" and "Uncle Remus," it seemed as though future work must lie in refining for the ore was all in sight. But there was one lead almost entirely forgotten or undervalued in the scramble for literary wealth and this lead was into the Southern nursery where the real black Mammy reigned. With the better lights before us now we realize the astonishing fact that the very heart center of the Southern civilization had not been touched. Mrs. Cocke in the charming stories contained in this volume is the happy pre-emptor of the new find. Every Southerner old enough will recognize the absolute truthfulness of the scenes and methods therein embalmed, and applaud the faithfulness with which she has reproduced that difficult potency, the gentle, tender, playful, elusive, young-old, child-wise mind of the African nurse in the white family; the mind to which all things appeal as living forces and all lives as speaking intelligences.