He wrote to Colonel Turner, and a few days later the Colonel drove up to town to take the unknown boy to his plantation.  So beside the editor Joel Chandler Harris rode to the office of the Countryman and to his happy destiny.  It has been said that but for the Turner plantation there would have been no Uncle Remus, but what would have become of the possibilities of that good old darky if the little Joel had not enjoyed the acquaintance of a good-natured post-master who permitted him to occupy the old green sofa and browse among the second-class mail of the Eatonton community?

Surely there was never a better school for the development of a budding author than the office of the Countryman, and the well-selected library in the home of its editor, and the great wildwood that environed the plantation.

Best of all, there were the “quarters,” where “Uncle Remus” conducted a whole university of history and zooelogy and philosophy and ethics and laughter and tears.  Down in the cabins at night the printer’s boy would sit and drink in such stores of wit and wisdom as could not lie unexpressed in his facile mind, and the world is the richer for every moment he spent in that primitive, child-mind community, with its ancient traditions that made it one with the beginning of time.

At times he joined a ’coon hunt, and with a gang of boys and a pack of hounds chased the elusive little animal through the night, returning home triumphant in the dawn.  He hunted rabbits in the woods, and, maybe, became acquainted with the character of the original Br’er Rabbit from his descendants in the old plantation forest.

From the window near which his type-case stood he saw the squirrels scampering over trees and roofs, heard the birds singing in the branches, caught dissolving views of Br’er Fox flitting across the garden path, and breathed in beauty and romance to be exhaled later for the enchantment of a world of readers.

In Colonel Hunter’s library, selected with scholarly taste, he found the great old English masters who had the good fortune to be born into the language while it was yet “a well of English undefiled.”  In that well he became saturated with a pure, direct, simple diction which later contact with the tendencies of his era and the ephemeral production of the daily press was not able to change.

* * * * *

It was in the office of the Countryman that Joel Chandler Harris made his first venture into the world of print, shyly, as became one who would afterward be known as the most modest literary man in America.  When Colonel Hunter found out the authorship of the bright paragraphs that slipped into his paper now and then with increasing frequency, he captured the elusive young genius and set it to work as a regular contributor.  In this periodical the young writer’s first poem appeared:  a mournful lay of love and death, as a first poem usually is, however cheerful a philosopher its author may ultimately become.