I'm a boy in old Tennessee. It's writ, word and music, by little
Mollie Hines, who lives with her pap, old Homer Hines, over on the
'Possum Trot. Mollie Hines is shore a poet, an' has a mighty sight
of fame, local. She's what you-all might call a jo-darter of a poet,
Mollie is; an' let anythin' touchin' or romantic happen anywhere
along the 'Possum Trot, so as to give her a subjeck, an' Mollie
would be down on it, instanter, like a fallin' star. She shorely is
a verse maker, an' is known in the Cumberland country as 'The
Nightingale of Big Bone Lick.' I remembers when a Shylock over to
the Dudleytown bank forecloses a mortgage on old Homer Hines, an'
offers his settlements at public vandue that a-way, how Mollie
prances out an' pours a poem into the miscreant. Thar's a hundred
an' 'levcn verses into it, an' each one like a bullet outen a
Winchester. It goes like this: "Thar's a word to be uttered to the
rich man in his pride.
(Which a gent is frequent richest when it's jest before he died!)
Thar's a word to be uttered to the hawg a-eatin' truck.
(Which a hawg is frequent fattest when it's jest before he's
stuck!)

"Mighty sperited epick, that! You recalls that English preacher
sharp that comes squanderin' 'round the tavern yere for his health
about a month ago? Shore! I knows you couldn't have overlooked no
bet like that divine. Well, that night in them parlors, when he
reads some rhymes in a book,--whatever is that piece he reads?
Locksley Hall; right you be, son! As I was sayin', when he's through
renderin' said Locksley Hall, he comes buttin' into a talk with me
where I'm camped in a corner all cosy as a toad onder a cabbage
leaf, reecoverin' myse'f with licker from them recitals of his, an'
he says to me, this parson party does: