There is a really fine hotel in Thomasville, — a large, well-appointed brick structure, with modern improvements. It overtops the surrounding buildings, so that one standing on its iron balconies can look away beyond the clustered town-houses to those of the country, as they nestle in their embowering orchards of Le Conte pear-trees.
On either side of the principal street of the town may be seen, here and there, pretty flower-gardens and clumps of Japan-plum bushes. A few orange - trees, some gnarled fig-trees, tall oaks, and spreading umbrella-trees shade the sandy lawns in front of the houses.
Thomasville is a resort for invalids, — a winter resort for consumptives, and a summer resort for persons ill of rheumatism or general debility. Its air is singularly pure and bracing, always bearing a smell of fresh turpentine, that healing balsam of the pines, and always touched with the sharpness of the sea. Many persons going South by way of Montgomery find it convenient and pleasant to stop off for a day or two of rest at this charming Georgian village; and it occasionally happens that some one, desirous of turning aside from that great stream of excursionists, tourists, health-seekers, pleasure - seekers, and orange - maniacs, which pours through Live Oak and Lake City on to Jacksonville and up the St. Johns, is led to accept the offer of a day's ride in a hack from Thomasville to Tallahassee. Whoever does this, does it with misgivings; but he never regrets it. Without doubt it is the most, delightful little journey to be had in the South.
Herman Willard — a young artist, wealthy, happy, in love with his profession, and confident of success whenever he should get ready to try for it, but at present not willing to try very hard — was in Thomasville when February was nearly ended. Here he was informed that the stage or hack route to Tallahassee was but thirty-five miles, whilst the way by rail, going down to Live Oak, and doubling back to the first-named place, would be a whole night's journey, with a very disagreeable change of cars. So he arranged to go in the hack, a sort of degenerate stagecoach, drawn by two horses and manned by a stalwart negro. This vehicle would set out on the following morning, so he found an afternoon of golden weather at his disposal. He resolved to make some sketches. It was while he stood on the sidewalk, rapidly pencilling the outlines of a low, broad-roofed cottage sunk deep among its trees, that a trivial thing happened which he remembered with distinctness a year afterwards, and will so remember to his dying hour, whenever that may come.
Two slender boys, students of the military academy hard by, stopped to look over his shoulders, as rude boys will. On the opposite sidewalk two ladies were passing, attended by a man on crutches. Of the former, one was an elderly woman; the other a girl just rounding into maturity, she might be twenty, tall, slender, dark, splendidly beautiful. The man, middle-aged, and of ordinary physique, had lost a leg.
"Who is that pretty girl, Tom ?" said one of the boys to the other, in a low tone.
The artist looked up; and, as his eyes met those of the young lady, he fairly started, so surprised was he with her wonderful loveliness.
"That's the Tallahassee girl," responded the boy addressed as Tom.
It seems that just then there was a little song, locally very popular, called "The Tallahassee Girl." Everybody in Thomasville was singing it. The music was of that happy, simple sort, which goes right to the popular sympathies.
One of the boys sang a stanza in a low, sweet, half-childish voice, as the two sauntered on. The words, —
"Oh ! the Tallahassee girl is a charmer:with the snatch of melody in which they were set adrift, made a lodgement in Willard's fancy. Of course the song had no connection with the young lady just passing, or with any other. It was as impersonal as any idle song could be. But the young man sent several swift glances after the lissome figure; and those two verses of the ditty got tangled in the convolutions of his brain, and staid there. The receptivity of youth is as unreliable as it often is sensitive. To-day an impression is easily made: to-morrow every thing slips off the surface, leaving no trace. At one moment a tender voice and smiling lips will thrill every chord: the next, all beauty goes for nought as against the dog and gun, or the rod and reel. An indistinct dream in which some angel-like face floated will make a whole day sweet; and anon the visions that remain distinctest after sleep will be those of grossest worldly ambition.
She sings like a mocking-bird in May," —
Just now Willard chanced to be in the mood for nursing gentle sentiments. The young lady left her photograph in his memory, and the air he breathed had in it for hours afterwards the sweetness of heliotrope.
As he stood there with his sketch-book in his left hand, the pencil in his right, as if arrested midway of a stroke, his head turned so that his face looked over his right shoulder, his slender, almost slight, figure firmly erect, he would himself have been a fine study for an artist.
All the rest of the afternoon, and throughout the evening, he was beset with such fancies as frame young faces in rose-mists, and build the airy castles of love-dreams.
Ah, this Southern climate, this fervent daytime, this cool, fragrant night-time, this balmy air, this burden of the birds and the flowers! Surely Love walks here, with his quiver and his bow.
Ranged around a circular gallery in the hotel, and next to the supper-room, a silver band discoursed music during the repast. To Willard it seemed beautifully significant that this orchestra marched him to the table on the melody of "The Tallahassee Girl." It was, indeed, a true touch of the place and the time, deeply suggestive of the half-rude, half-cultured condition of society in a village where the old South was rapidly giving place to the new. Nothing so certainly registers the changes of public feeling as the giving-up of the old sort of songs, and the taking-up of a new sort. Georgia was the first Southern State to throw aside "Dixie," and take up the later-day ballads: it was also the first Southern State to trade shotguns for schoolhouses. That is to say, that, while other States were still shooting men down to the level of their ideas, Georgia had begun to educate them up to hers. She had quickly discerned that true statesmanship in any party, Democratic or Republican, is grounded in the educating of the masses, and not in leading their ignorance by appeals to their prejudices on one hand, or by whelming them with brute force on the other. She had begun to date her history from the close of the war, forgetting that Hamilton and Jefferson ever quarrelled, little heeding Jackson and Calhoun, but accepting the national promise in place of the State-rights theory; burying the lost cause, and planting above it the flag of the Union. No such reflections as these conditions might suggest came into Willard's mind. He hated politics. Beauty and pleasure in the lightest and least didactic form filled the whole field of his vision. He was nothing if not, in the latest sense, an aesthete.
That night a tall, dark girl, whose gray eyes were full of the wonder of a new passion, strayed back and forth through his dreams. Infinite distances of tropical landscape opened before him, unknown perfumes floated around him, and the breeze from distant gardens of bloom wafted to his ears again and again two or three turns of a sweet, simple tune.
When he awoke the sunlight was flooding his room, and the driver of the so-called stage was plaintively blowing his bugle in warning that he soon would be ready to go.
Willard leaped from his bed, and, while he was hastily but scrupulously making his toilet, hummed the latest and most popular Thomasville air.
