Personally the fanciful story-teller is small, spare, and shy. His is an elusive personality. "A personality more winsome and delightful," says one of his friends, "it would be difficult to find. It is a small man that sits before you, a keen-eyed man, whose eyes you know miss nothing, a man whose mustache is iron-gray and whose hair is almost white. His photographs give no hint of the man; they do not even mirror his personal appearance. Nothing save a talk with him gives you that." Another friend has said: "The big dark eyes, full of patient, weary expression, are luminous; the mouth close and discouraged, expands into smiling curves, sweet and sympathetic; the whole soul is in the face, and from head to foot, Frank Stockton is the genial responsive man. It is like a brilliant burst of sunshine following a cloud, suddenly and unexpectedly, and therefore more delicious in surprise and beauty."
Everyone under this charmer's spell will, we are sure, say with Edmund Clarence Stedman:
I have stayed at the Rudder Grange Just after the wedding chime, Though that jolliest lodge--how strange!-- Is of age at this very time; I have roamed in the Squirrel Inn (With my vouchers from Germantown); To the House of Martha I've been, And more than once have gone down In the queerest of all queer wrecks, And have argued and taken my tea With Mesdames Aleshine and Lecks, All up to our necks in the sea; I have solved, with my private elf, That Lady-and-Tiger riddle That routed the Sphinx herself And parted the world in the middle; And all this fellowship jolly, With a wizard that led me around Through wonder and sweetest folly, From first to last I have found His fancy more passing rare Than that of mask or mummer Since Puck and Oberon wove the snare In a night's dream of midsummer; So I'll roam with him and his throng, Wherever the course meander, Though he frolic a century long. And outlive by a year the sage vizier Of the Two-Horned Alexander.
In an article published by _The Bookman_ not very long ago Mr. James Lane Allen remarked that Uncle Remus was one of the two names in American fiction which have attained anything like universality of acceptance, the other name being, of course, Uncle Tom. And yet fame was thrust upon Mr. Joel Chandler Harris.