There is more to this story, about her visiting the Cherokee Indians down there. But I don't remember the Cherokee chapter as well as the old Mr. Jack one. Still I hope this gives some kind of picture of Elsie's real life.
A great Englishman died a few years ago, little known in America. His name, Sir Charles Dilke. A statesman, a radical, a republican; and a strong solid man.
There is one thing that strikes you about some of these leaders, in England: the number of advantages they have when they're boys, growing up. It gives them a tremendous head-start. Charles Dilke began meeting great men when he was a mere child: the Duke of Wellington, Thackeray, Dickens,--I could name a long list. And he had the close companionship of a grandfather, a man of distinction, who treated him as an equal, and devoted himself to his grandson's development.
Think of other small boys, who show signs of fine brains and strong characters. Are they ever introduced to Thackeray or treated as equals? No, they're taught to respect their dull fathers and their fathers' ideas. They are taught not to have any separate ideas of their own. Or at best they run wild with no wise elder friend, like Charles Dilke's.
Here is one of his grandfather's letters. Shows the tone of their friendship. The boy has just won an English Essay Prize, and "they say that parts of my essay were vulgar," he writes. "My special interest," his grandfather answers, "is aroused by the charge of occasional vulgarity. If it be true, it is not improbable that the writer caught the infection from his grandfather. With one half the world, in its judgment of literature and life, vulgarity is the opposite of gentility, and gentility is merely negative, and implies the absence of all character, and, in language, of all idiom, all bone and muscle.... You may find in Shakespeare household words and phrases from every condition and walk in life--as much coarseness as you please to look for--anything and everything except gentility and vulgarity. Occasional vulgarity is, therefore, a question on which I refuse to take the opinion of any man not well known to me."
Good for Grandfather! Eh? He was a pretty interesting old boy. He might have been a great man himself, if he could have brought himself up. But Great-grandfather had been in the government's service in England, some position in the Navy Department, or the Admiralty, as they call it. And when his son grew up, he got him a place in the Admiralty too. He meant well, but Grandfather might have done better without.