But any close follower of magazine literature for the past ten years is familiar enough with his name to pronounce such a statement very far wide of the mark. Mr. Chesnutt was born of Southern parents forty years ago in Cleveland. When he was ten tears old, almost immediately after the war, his parents moved to North Carolina, where the boy grew familiar with the country described in his book. The educational advantages of North Carolina were not at that time good, but he enjoyed excep- tional opportunities, and profited by them. Perhaps the fact that the boy was exceptional accounts for the exceptional opportunities.
Talent develops itself in spite of mediocre teachers.
At sixteen years of age the young student began to teach as pupil-teacher. At twenty-three, he became Principal of the State Normal School at Fayetteville, where he taught for two years. Although nominally his education was no more advanced than the grammar-school grade with some higher branches, yet by private study and wide reading the youthful principle gained a knowledge of the classics, of French and German, and, as his stories show, of pure English and of general literature. Like many literary men of the present generation, he received his college training from life. After a time Mr. Chesnutt tired of life in the South, and longed for wider opportunity.