What My Lover Said
‘What My Lover Said’ was an obscure lassie ‘Away Down South in Dixie,’ I appeal to the chivalry of my native land to shield me from their stings.”
The appeal was not in vain. “What more can be said?” asks Mr. Boyd. “Does not Mrs. Jones’s statement touch every point at issue in the controversy? Her letter is explicit, straightforward, and to my mind carries conviction with it.” The New York Sun was also convinced and said so editorially. So, no doubt, were all the other chivalrous defenders of the shy Southern lassie.
Mr. Greene, meanwhile, had offered to present his home at Honesdale, which he valued at $15,000, to any one who could prove that the poem had been published anywhere prior to its appearance in the Evening Post in November, 1875. Mrs. Jones’s partizans claimed that she had won the prize, and that the house should be turned over to her forthwith; but Mr. Greene’s friends asked for a little more evidence, and another Southern woman, living at Raleigh, N. C, took her pen in hand to make some caustic observations.
“Mrs. Jones brings no proof whatever into court,” she wrote in a letter to the Sun, which was still warmly espousing Mrs. Jones’s cause. “Her unsubstantiated word, however excellent her personal worth, can not outweigh facts and
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