he nozzle of his burning boat against the bank

"Till the last galoot's ashore."

The manners and dialect of other classes and sections of the country have
received abundant illustration of late years. Edward Eggleston's
_Hoosier Schoolmaster_, 1871, and his other novels are pictures of rural
life in the early days of Indiana. _Western Windows_, a volume of poems
by John James Piatt, another native of Indiana, had an unmistakable local
coloring. Charles G. Leland, of Philadelphia, in his _Hans Breitmann_
ballads, in dialect, gave a humorous presentation of the German-American
element in the cities. By the death, in 1881, of Sidney Lanier, a
Georgian by birth, the South lost a poet of rare promise, whose original
genius was somewhat hampered by his hesitation between two arts of
expression, music and verse, and by his effort to co-ordinate them. His
_Science of English Verse_, 1880, was a most suggestive, though hardly
convincing, statement of that theory of their relation which he was
working out in his practice. Some of his pieces, {582} like the _Mocking
Bird_ and the _Song of the Chattahoochie_, are the most
characteristically Southern poetry that has been written in America.
Joel Chandler Harris's _Uncle Remus_ stories, in Negro dialect, are
transcripts from the folk-lore of the plantations, while his collection
of stories, _At Teague Poteet's_, together with Miss Murfree's _In the
Tennessee Mountains_ and her other books have made the Northern public
familiar with the wild life of the "moonshiners," who distill illicit
whiskey in the mountains of Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
These tales are not only exciting in incident, but strong and fresh in
their delineations of character. Their descriptions of mountain scenery
are also impressive, though, in the case of the last named writer,
frequently too prolonged. George W. Cable's sketches of French Creole
life in New Orleans attracted attention by their freshness and quaintness
when published in the magazines and re-issued in book form as _Old Creole
Days_, in 1879. His first regular novel, the _Grandissimes_, 1880, was
likewise a story of Creole life. It had the same winning qualities as
his short stories and sketches, but was an advance upon them in dramatic
force, especially in the intensely tragic and powerfully told episode of
"Bras Coupe." Mr. Cable has continued his studies of Louisiana types and
ways in his later books, but the _Grandiss