Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

APPLEBORO

"Now there was my cousin Eliza," Miss Sally Ruth Dexter once said to me, "who was forced to make her home for thirty years in Vienna! She married an attaché of the Austrian legation, you know; met him while she was visiting in Washington, and she was such a pretty girl and he was such a charming man that they fell in love with each other and got married. Afterward his family procured him a very influential post at court, and of course poor Cousin Eliza had to stay there with him. Dear mama often said she considered it a most touching proof of woman's willingness to sacrifice herself—for there's no doubt it must have been very hard on poor Cousin Eliza. She was born and raised right here in Appleboro, you see."

Do not think that Miss Sally Ruth was anything but most transparently sincere in thus sympathizing with the sad fate of poor Cousin Eliza, who was born and raised in Appleboro, South Carolina, and yet sacrificed herself by dragging out thirty years of exile in the court circles of Vienna! Any trueborn Appleboron would be equally sorry for Cousin Eliza for the same reason that Miss Sally Ruth was. Get yourself born in South Carolina and you will comprehend.

"What did you see in your travels that you liked most?" I was curious to discover from an estimable citizen who had spent a summer abroad.

"Why, General Lee's standin' statue in the Capitol an' his recumbent figure in Washington an' Lee chapel, of co'se!" said the colonel promptly. "An' listen hyuh, Father De Rancé, I certainly needed him to take the bad taste out of my mouth an' the red out of my eye after viewin' Bill Sherman on a brass hawse in New York, with an angel that'd lost the grace of God prancin' on ahead of him!" He added reflectively: "I had my own ideah as to where any angel leadin' him was most likely headed for!"

"Oh, I meant in Europe!" hastily.

"Well, father, I saw pretty near everything in Europe, I reckon; likewise New York. But comin' home I ran up to Washington an' Lee to visit the general lyin' there asleep, an' it just needed one glance to assure me that the greatest an' grandest work of art in this round world was right there before me! What do folks want to rush off to foreign parts for, where they can't talk plain English an' a man can't get a satisfyin' meal of home cookin', when we've got the greatest work of art an' the best hams ever cured, right in Virginia? See America first, I say. Why, suh, I was so glad to get back to good old Appleboro that I let everybody else wait until I'd gone around to the monument an' looked up at our man standin' there on top of it, an' I found myself sayin' over the names he's guardin' as if I was sayin' my prayers: our names.

"Uh huh, Europe's good enough for Europeans an' the Nawth's a God's plenty good enough for Yankees, but Appleboro for me. Why, father, they haven't got anything like our monument to their names!"

They haven't. And I should hate to think that any Confederate living or dead ever even remotely resembled the gray granite one on our monument....