People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 March 1896 — THE MAJAH’S TOAST. [ARTICLE]

THE MAJAH’S TOAST.

A Little Incident of New Vork Day at the Atlanta Fair. There was one toast drank at that little dinner which Capt. Loury gave to Mayor W. L. Strong at the Capitol City club in Atlanta to which only 'one man responded and he was the man who proposed it, says the New York Press. But what it lacked in the music of the clinking glasses it made up in. its fervency and warmth. - All the evening the north and the south had been throwing oral bouquets at each other. The south had healed its old wound in the warmth of the captain’s good wine and had pledged itself again and again to eternal friendship. The north forgot all about Bull Run and Andersonville in the same bubbling elixir and returned the pledges with extravagant eloquence. Then some one proposed a toast to the new south and every one had something to offer. Its praises were sung from one end of the mahogany to the other, and the new south, witlr its new vitality and its new prosperity, was extolled in prose and verse. They praised its wonderful energy and its deliverance from bondage. And the man who drank the silent toast sat out in the case and listened. He was tall and gaunt and straight, with bushy bright eyebrows and a limp in his right leg. He got that when he was a major in the 13th Georgia and he had never forgotten that he was a major or that he was in the 13th Georgia. He listened to the eulogies of the new south as long as he could and then he limped over to the bar. “Now, majah,” he said, and a new light came into the old eyes, “you 1 and I, sah, will drink to the old south, to her ol’ shif’lessness and her doggone happiness. ’