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 zoölogy 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