h things were done there, nor in the mountains of Alabama,
whence he professed to come. Acquainted only with a narrow region, the
poor fellow did not know that every Southern district has its own
dialect, and that the travelled ear of a close observer can detect the
slightest deviation from its customary phrases. But he was not alone in
this ignorance. Almost every Northern writer who has undertaken to
describe Southern life has fallen into the same error. Even Olmstead,
who has caught the idioms wonderfully, confounds the dialects of
different regions, and makes a Northern Georgian "right smart," when he
had been only "powerful stupid" all his life.

The professional scout generally was a native of the South,--some
illiterate and simple-minded, but brave and self-devoted "poor white
man," who, if he had worn shoulder-straps, and been able to write
"interesting" dispatches, might now be known as a hero half the world
over. Some of these men, had they been born at the North, where free
schools are open to all, would have led armies, and left a name to live
after them. But they were born at the South, had their minds cramped and
their souls stunted by a system which dwarfs every noble thing; and so,
their humble mission over, they have gone down unknown and unhonored,
amid the silence and darkness of their native woods.

I hope to rescue the memory of one of these men--John Jordan, from the
head of Baine--from utter oblivion by writing this article. He is now
beyond the hearing of my words; but I would record one act in his short
career, that his pure patriotism may lead some of us to know better and
love more the much-abused and misunderstood class to which he belonged.

* * * * *

Early in the war the command of an important military expedition was
intrusted to the president of a Western college. Though a young man,
this scholar had already achieved a "character" and a history. Beginning
life a widow's son, his first sixteen years were passed between a farm,
a canal, and a black-saltern. Being an intelligent, energetic lad, his
friends formed the usual hopes of him; but when he apprenticed himself
to a canal-boat, their faith failed, and, after the fashion of Job's
friends, they comforted his mother with the assurance that her son had
taken the swift train to the Devil. But, like Job, she knew in whom she
believed, and the boy soon justified her confidence. An event shortly
occurred whi