“Up from Slavery,” and another biography in a different field, for which he was responsible, was Miss Helen Keller’s “Story of My Life.”  And only once, amid these fine but not showy activities, did Page’s life assume anything in the nature of the sensational.  This was in 1909, when he published his one effort at novel writing, “The Southerner.”  To write novels had been an early ambition with Page; indeed his papers disclose that he had meditated several plans of this kind; but he never seriously settled himself to the task until the year 1906.  In July of that year the Atlantic Monthly began publishing a serial entitled “The Autobiography of a Southerner Since the Civil War,” by Nicholas Worth.  The literary matter that appeared under this title most readers accepted as veracious though anonymous autobiography.  It related the life adventures of a young man, born in the South, of parents who had had little sympathy with the Confederate cause, attempting to carve out his career in the section of his birth and meeting opposition and defeat from the prejudices with which he constantly found himself in conflict.  The story found its main theme and background in the fact that the Southern States were so exclusively living in the memories of the Civil War that it was impossible for modern ideas to obtain a foothold.  “I have sometimes thought,” said the author, and this passage may be taken as embodying the leading point of the narrative, “that many of the men who survived that unnatural war unwittingly did us a greater hurt than the war itself.  It gave everyone of them the intensest experience of his life and ever afterward he referred every other experience to this.  Thus it stopped the thought of most of them as an earthquake stops a clock.  The fierce blow of battle paralyzed the mind.  Their speech was a vocabulary of war, their loyalties were loyalties, not to living ideas or duties, but to old commanders and to distorted traditions.  They were dead men, most of them, moving among the living as ghosts; and yet, as ghosts in a play, they held the stage.”  In another passage the writer names the “ghosts” which are chiefly responsible for preventing Southern progress.  They are three:  “The Ghost of the Confederate dead, the Ghost of religious orthodoxy, the Ghost of Negro domination.”  Everywhere the hero finds his progress blocked by these obstructive wraiths of the past.  He seeks a livelihood in educational work—­becomes a local superintendent of Public Instruction, and loses his place because his religious views are unorthodox, because he refuses to accept the popular estimate of Confederate statesmen, and because he hopes to educate the black child as well as the white one.  He enters politics and runs for public office on the platform of the new day, is elected, and then finds himself counted out by political ringsters.  Still he does not lose faith, and finally settles down in the management of a cotton mill, convinced that the real path of