Abstract

A New Southern Author

The article focuses on two books. "Abraham Page, Esq.," and "What I Know About Ben Eccles," by Abraham Page. There is an improbability in the supposition that a man should spend the latter part of his life in writing a succession of stories about himself and his neighbors, and locking them up, one after another, in his desk for his executor to find and publish; but, after granting due weight to that improbability and taking also into account the fact that the style of the prefaces and of the executor's occasional notes is very like that of the stories which they accompany, there is little or nothing in the manner or the matter of the books themselves which it would do to adduce as internal evidence that any intentional mystification has been practiced on the reader.