This ballad perhaps was "Nelly Bly," or "Nelly was a Lady," or "Lucy Long," or "Oh, Susanna," or "Nancy Till," or, better than any of these, Stephen Foster's "Way Down upon the Swanee River," a song that has touched more hearts than "Annie Laurie" itself; for, after all, "The Girl We Left Behind Us" is not more precious in our eyes than "The Old Folks at Home;" and the American has sunk very low indeed of whom it cannot be said that "he never shook his mother." Foster is utterly unappreciated by his fellow-countrymen, who erect all their monuments to the men who make their laws. He was the author of "Massa's in the Cold, Cold Ground," "Old Dog Tray," "Old Uncle Ned," "Old Folks at Home," "Old Kentucky Home," "Willie, We have Missed You," and "Come where My Love lies Dreaming." He died as he had lived, in 1864, when he was but thirty-seven years of age, and his "Hard Times Will Come Again No More." Joel Chandler Harris, who is one of the best friends the plantation negro ever had, and who certainly knows him thoroughly, startled the whole community by writing to the _Critic_, in the autumn of 1883, that he had never seen a banjo or a tambourine or a pair of bones in the hands of the negroes on any of the plantations of middle Georgia with which he is familiar; that they made sweet music with the quills, as Pan did; that they played passably well on the fiddle, the fife, the flute, and the bugle; that they beat enthusiastically on the triangle; but that they knew not at all the instruments tradition had given them. That Uncle Remus, cannot "pick" the banjo, and never even heard it "picked," seems hardly credible; but Mr. Harris knows. Uncle Remus, however, is not a travelled darky, and the existence of the banjo in other parts of the South has been clearly proved. Mr. Cable quotes a creole negro ditty of before the war in which "Musieu Bainjo" is mentioned on every line. Maurice Thompson says the banjo is a common instrument among the field hands in North Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee; and he describes a rude banjo manufactured by its dusky performer out of a flat gourd, strung with horse-hair; while we find in Thomas Jefferson's _Notes on Virginia_, printed in 1784, the following statement: "In music they [the blacks] are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch." In a foot-note Jefferson adds, "The instrument proper to them is the banjar, which they brought hither from Africa." [Illustration: STEPHEN C. FOSTER.]