CROSSVILLE CHRONICLE.
April 27, 1909.
HAS BEEN SICK. That was Gunter’s Condition, but He has Recovered and Writes to Congratulate Cumberland County. Seems he had a spell in the hospital. I had a very severe spell of sickness. I immediately became homesick. I wanted to be where I could sit under my own vine and fig tree. Where I could hear my own roosters crow. Where I could eat the eggs my own hens had laid.
I recruited and arrived home, and had scarcely got settled when I was stricken again and throughout the long dreary winter my room has been a weary hospital of pain.
I have been forced to employ doctors and take a cart load of their physic, nasty bitter medicine, and though this beautiful springtime has found me improved and once more able for my rations my opinion of doctors and doctrine remains unchanged.
I want to congratulate the Kingdom of Cumberland on their selection of W.O. Kearley as judge. His feet can fill any man’s shoes no matter how large. And I predict for him a career, as creditable to himself as it is beneficial to his people. And I wish also to congratulate Judge Kearley and to indulge the hope that his reign may be long and lively.
During my long sickness the Chronicle has been a faithful visitor. Only once a week it came, yet it was more welcome than the doctor who came every day.
One day he came and wanted me to put out my tongue. Out it came about 8 inches.
“Now I understand,” says he, “that you think doctors are quacks.”
“I do, Dock,” says I, ‘but I didn’t know you could tell a man’s thoughts by looking at his tongue.”
When the weather gets hot and the roads get passable, I am coming out to see how the farmers are getting along raising potatoes. I used to beat anybody on ‘taters. I remember Squire Pogue and Hawkeye thought they would make me blush. They would take their line and line their patch and run so straight there would not be a variation by so much as a hair’s breadth.
I had a one-eyed mule, and I would start a furrow and start straight enough, but I and the mule would both go to sleep and pull through with a row crooked as a vexed cat’s back. They made straight rows and they had all the science — and I had all the potatoes.
In fact, I never could raise anything in a straight row, and I never tried. Nature loves variation and outrage. You see that in the lay of the land and the way she deposited her strata of coal. Everything conglomerate and out of order. When I come out there to farm I am going to butt in to please nature and mix and mingle things and show people how to humor nature. Gunter.
SAM DAVIS. The unveiling of the Sam Davis monument will take place at Nashville tomorrow. It has been erected to commemorate the heroic bravery of a man, who, when caught by the Federal forces and found with incriminating evidence on his person, died rather than give the name of his informant.
Davis was a spy in the Confederate army and his remarkable bravery has been the cause of many eulogies and the monument that is to be unveiled tomorrow is to commemorate his heroism.
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Old Uncle Gib is a weekly historical feature published each week. Old Uncle Gib is a pseudonym that was used by S.C. Bishop, who founded the Chronicle in 1886. Bishop actively published the Chronicle until 1948.