Word: old
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...transcribed her jottings, found that they filled 50 notebooks. At her death in 1886 she left them to a girlhood friend, who had them published in a highly expurgated edition. The re-editing job that Novelist Ben Ames Williams has done on Mary Chesnut may not only change the old picture of a slightly stuffy diarist, it may also alter a few notions of what life in the Confederacy was like...
...Old Sinner. "I traveled with a racking headache and a morphine bottle," Mary Chesnut wrote of her trip from Charleston to the secession conference in Montgomery, Ala. "I felt a nervous dread and horror of this break with so great a power as the United States, but I was ready and willing." In Montgomery she went to supper with Governor Moore ("The old sinner has been making himself ridiculous with that little actress Maggie Mitchell"). She saw a Negro woman sold into slavery: "My very soul sickened." She said to a Northern-born woman: "If you can stand that...
...Society Hill, was found dead in her bed. She was quite well the night before . . ." Mrs. Witherspoon, it developed, had been murdered. Her son, riding away, had foolishly told some of the slaves that he was going to punish them the next day. That night the slaves smothered the old woman in her bed, assuming, concluded Mary, that in the excitement over the death their punishment would be forgotten...
...Touch That Soup! The murder went so quietly that the slaves decided to rob the old lady, too. While they were getting into her trunks, she revived. The second attempt was more thorough, left traces. It also terrified the few white people at Mulberry. When their maids offered to sleep in the same room, to protect them, the women were even more terrified. When they sat down to dinner, old Mrs. Chesnut cried: "I warn you! Don't touch that soup! It is bitter. There is something wrong about it." As it happened, the soup was all right...
Russell Janney is an old and successful hand at reducing religious feeling to bathos ; his slushy novel, The Miracle of the Bells (TIME, Sept. 16, 1946), sold 750,000 copies. His doggerel Vision of Red O'Shea may not do as well, but it has a distinction of its own: not since Edgar Guest lit his Harbor Lights of Home and Robert Service thumped through Songs of a Sourdough has a versifier shown such loving absorption in platitude and meticulous attention to clich...