In seasons, as in other things, we have our individual preferences. Melancholy natures usually love autumn, with its colorings so like sweet sad minor chords. But what kind of natures they are which rejoice in spring, which feel that with each spring the gloomy past is blotted out, and life, with all its opportunities, begins anew—what kind of natures they are which recognize April instead of January as the beginning of their year I shall not attempt to tell, for mine is such a nature, and one must not act at once as subject and diagnostician.
So long as I endure, spring can never come again without turning my thoughts to northwestern Georgia; to the peculiar penetrating warmth which passed through the clothing to the body and made one feel that one was not surrounded by mere air, but was immersed in a dry bath of some infinitely superior vapor, a vapor volatile, soothing, tonic, distilled, it seemed, from the earth, from pine trees, tulip trees, balm-of-Gilead trees, (or "bam" trees, as they call them), blossoming Judas trees, Georgia crabapple, dogwood pink and white, peach blossom, wistaria, sweet-shrub, dog violets, pansy violets, Cherokee roses, wild honeysuckle and azalia, and the evanescent green of new treetops, all carried in solution in the sunlight. By day the brilliant cardinal adds his fine note of color and sound, but at night he is silent, and when the moon comes out one hears the mockingbird and, it may be also, two whippoorwills, one in the grove near the house, one in the woods across the road, calling back and forth. Then one is tempted to step down from the porch, and follow the voices of the birds into the vague recesses of a night webbed with dark tree shadows outlined in blue moonlight.
Small wonder it is, if, as report says, no houseparty on a southern plantation is a success unless young couples become "sort of engaged," and if in a region so provocative in springtime under a full moon, a distinction is recognized between being merely "engaged," and being engaged to be married.
One Georgia belle we met, a sloe-eyed girl whose reputation not only for beauty but for charm reached through the entire South, had, at the time of our visit, recently become engaged in the more grave and permanent sense.
"How does it seem?" a girl friend asked her.
"I feel," she answered, "like a man who has built up a large business and is about to go into the hands of a receiver."
Such ways as those girls have! Such voices! Such eyes! And such names, too! Names which would not fit at all into a northern setting, relatively so hard and unsentimental, but which, when one becomes accustomed to them, take their place gracefully and harmoniously in the southern picture. The South likes diminutives and combinations in its women's names. Its Harriets, Franceses, Sarahs, and Marthas, become Hatties, Fannies, Sallies and Patsies, and Patsy sometimes undergoes a further transition and becomes Passie. Moreover, where these diminutives have been passed down for several generations in a family, their origin is sometimes lost sight of, and the diminutive becomes the actual baptismal name. In one family of my acquaintance, for example, the name Passie has long been handed down from mother to daughter. The original great-grandmother Passie was christened Martha but was at first called Patsy; then, because her black mammy was also named Patsy, the daughter of the house came to be known, for purposes of differentiation, as Passie, and when she married and had a daughter of her own, the child was christened Passie. In this family the name May has more recently been adopted as a middle name, and it is customary for familiars of the youngest Passie, to address her not merely as Passie, but as Passie-May. The inclusion of the second name, in this fashion, is another custom not uncommon in the South. In Atlanta alone I heard of ladies habitually referred to as Anna-Laura, Hattie-May, Lollie-Belle, Sally-Maud, Nora-Belle, Mattie-Sue, Emma-Belle, Lottie-Belle, Susie-May, Lula-Belle, Sallie-Fannie, Hattie-Fannie, Lou-Ellen, Allie-Lou, Clara-Belle, Mary-Ella, and Hattie-Belle. Another young lady was known to her friends as Jennie-D.
The train from Atlanta set us down at Covington, Georgia, or rather at the station which lies between the towns of Covington and Oxford—for when this railroad was built neither town would allow it a right of way, and to this day each is connected with the station by a street car line, either line equipped with one diminutive car, a pair of disconsolate mules, and a driver. Covington is the County seat, a quiet southern town, part old, part new, with a look of rural prosperity about it. Stopping at the postoffice to inquire for mail we saw this peremptory sign displayed:
When the window is down don't bang around and ask for a stamp or two.
—J. L. Callaway, Postmaster.