The Project Gutenberg EBook of Aunt Rachel, by David Christie Murray

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Title: Aunt Rachel

Author: David Christie Murray

Release Date: August 1, 2007 [EBook #22202]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AUNT RACHEL ***

Produced by David Widger

AUNT RACHEL

By David Christie Murray

Author Of "First Person Singular" "Rainbow Gold" Etc.

1880

PREFACE.

A critic, otherwise almost altogether friendly, protests, in reviewing a
recent book of mine, that no rustics ever would, could, or will talk in
real life as the rustics in that work are made to talk by me. Since this
criticism might apply still more pointedly, if it were true, to "Aunt
Rachel" than to "Rainbow Gold," I desire to say a word or two in
self-defence. A little, a very little, of the average rustic would go
a long way in fiction. But I do not profess to deal with the average
rustic. I deal, and love to deal, with the rustic exceptional, the
village notable and wiseacre. Observant readers will have noticed
that the date of one story is 1853, and that the epoch of the other
is remoter by a dozen years. In my boyhood, in the Staffordshire Black
Country, the rustic people were saturated with the speech of the Bible,
the Church Service, and the "Pilgrim's Progress." It is otherwise
to-day, and their English, when it pretends at all to a literary
flavor, is the English of the local weekly paper. The gravity, the slow
sententiousness, and purposed wisdom of the utterances of more than one
or two knots of habitual companions whom I can recall, were outside the
chances of exaggeration. Often these people were really wise and witty.
They were the makers of the local proverbial philosophy, and many of
their phrases are alive today. I recall and could set down here a score
of the quaintest bits of humor and good-sense, and one or two things
genuinely poetical, which were spoken in my childish hearing. But I
refrain myself easily from this temptation, because I have not written
my last Black Country story, and prefer to put these things in a form as
near their own as I can achieve. I only desire to say that I have _not_
exaggera