Page:Southern Life in Southern Literature.djvu/201

 Those who were in the condition of the prodigal (barring the father, the calf—the fatted one I mean—and the fiddle) had to turn their accomplishments to account; and many of them, having lost all by eating and drinking, sought the retributive justice from meat and drink, which might at least support them in poverty. Accordingly they kept tavern and made a barter of hospitality, a business the only disagreeable part of which was receiving the money, and the only one I know for which a man can eat and drink himself into qualification. And while I confess I never knew a Virginian, out of the state, to keep a bad tavern, I never knew one to draw a solvent breath from the time he opened house until death or the sheriff closed it.

Others again got to be not exactly overseers but some nameless thing, the duties of which were nearly analogous, for some more fortunate Virginian, who had escaped the wreck and who had got his former boon companion to live with him on board, or other wages, in some such relation that the friend was not often found at table at the dinings given to the neighbors, and had got to be called Mr. Flournoy instead of Bob, and slept in an outhouse in the yard, and only read the Enquirer of nights and Sundays.

Some of the younger scions that had been transplanted early and stripped of their foliage at a tender age, had been turned into birches for the corrective discipline of youth. Yes; many who had received academical or collegiate educations, disregarding the allurements of the highway, turning from the gala-day exercise of ditching, scorning the effeminate relaxation of splitting rails, heroically led the Forlorn Hope of the battle of life, the corps of pedagogues of country schools—academies, I beg pardon for not saying; for, under the Virginia economy, every crossroad log cabin, where boys were flogged from B-a-k-e-r to Constantinople, grew into the dignity of a sort