[HESTER HIGBEE GEPPERT]
Mrs. Hester Higbee Geppert ("Dolly Higbee"), newspaper woman and novelist, was born near Edina, Missouri, March 12, 1854. She was the daughter of James Parker Higbee, a Kentuckian, and his second wife, Martha Lane (Galleher) Higbee, a woman of Virginian parentage. Both of Miss Higbee's parents died before she was fourteen years old, and she came to Lexington, Kentucky, to live in the family of Dr. Samuel H. Chew, who had married her half-sister. Dr. Chew's farm was situated some seven miles from Lexington, and there Miss Higbee lived for ten years. She was educated in Midway, Kentucky, and then taught for several years. She detested teaching and, "in January, 1878, while it was still quite dark, I stole down stairs with five dollars in my pocket and such luggage as I could carry in a handbag, tiptoed into the drizzle and 'lit out.'" The flip of a nickle determined that her new home should be Louisville, and to that city she went. Miss Higbee was the first woman in Kentucky, if not in the South, to adopt journalism as a profession. The following fourteen years of her life were spent in the daily grind of newspaperdom, she having held almost every position on The Courier-Journal, save that of editor-in-chief. In the four hottest weeks of the year, and in the brief intervals of leisure she could snatch from her daily duties, Miss Higbee wrote her now famous novel, In God's Country (New York, 1890). After the Lippincotts had refused this manuscript, Belford's Monthly Magazine accepted it by telegram, paying the author two hundred dollars for it, and publishing it in the issue for November, 1889; and in the following May the story appeared in book form. Colonel Henry Watterson wrote a review of In God's Country that was afterwards published as an introduction for it, and this did much to bring the tale into wide notice. Miss Higbee went to Chicago in 1893 to accept a position on The Tribune. On April 4, 1894, she was married to Mr. William Geppert of Atlanta, and the first five years of their married life were spent at Atlanta. It was during this time that Mrs. Geppert's best story was written, Burton's Scoop, one of the first American stories written upon hypnotism and related phenomena. The opening chapters of this appeared in the author's little literary magazine, The Autocrat, which she conducted at Atlanta for about two years, but it has never been published in book form. Two musical romances, entitled The Scherzo in B-Flat Minor (Atlanta, 1895), and Un Ze Studio (Atlanta, 1895), attracted considerable attention, and a third was announced as Side Lights, but was never published. In God's Country was dramatized, with Miss Catherine Gray cast in the role of Lydia, and opened at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, New York, September 5, 1897, but the work of the playwright and actors was most displeasing to the author. In 1900 Mr. Geppert became one of the editors of the New York Musical Courier, and he and his wife have since resided at Croton-on-the-Hudson. Mrs. Geppert has abandoned literature, but In God's Country has given her a permanent place among the writers of Kentucky.[10]
Bibliography. Confessions of a Tatler, by Elvira M. Slaughter (Louisville, 1905); Lexington Leader (July 25, 1909).
THE GARDENER AND THE GIRL[11]
[From In God's Country (New York, 1890)]
Her hair had come down and was tumbling about her neck; she whipped it out and caught it back with a hairpin, took up the guitar, and skirted the shadowy porch to the room over the kitchen. The window was open and she could see Karl sitting in the middle of the room with his head bowed upon his hands. She tapped lightly on the pane. He looked up and saw her standing in the dim light with the guitar in her hand.
"Karl," she said, "I want you to sing me that song before you go—the one you sung me that day for your dinner."
He came forward and took the instrument. He saw she had been crying, but the experience of the summer had been so crushing, he was so subdued by her past behavior, that he did not dream the tears were for him.
"You are grieved for someding," he said, with touching sympathy.
He opened the door and gave her a chair, and, sitting near her on the sill of the window, began to sing the song with all the tenderness and pathos his own yearning and bitter disappointment could put into it. It brought back all the old tumult. She saw now, when it was too late, that she had overestimated her strength. When he finished, she was sobbing; and in an instant he was kneeling by her chair, raising to her a face sad, searching, but shining with the tremulous glow of a hope just born.