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Provincialism

Some time ago an English friend of Colonel W. J. Lampton's living in New York and having never visited the South, went to Virginia to spend a month with friends. After a fortnight of it, he wrote back: "Oh, I say, old top, you never told me that the South was anything like I have found it, and so different to the North. Why, man, it's God's country."

The Colonel, who gets his title from Kentucky, answered promptly by postal. "Of course it is," he wrote. "You didn't suppose God was a Yankee, did you?"

A southerner, with his intense love for his own district, attended a banquet. The next day a friend asked him who was present. With a reminiscent smile he replied: "An elegant gentleman from Virginia, a gentleman from Kentucky, a man from Ohio, a bounder from Chicago, a fellow from New York, and a galoot from Maine."

They had driven fourteen miles to the lake, and then rowed six miles across the lake to get to the railroad station, when the Chicago man asked: "How in the world do you get your mail and newspapers here in the winter when the storms are on?" "Wa-al, we don't sometimes. I've seen this lake thick up so that it was three weeks before we got a Chicago paper," answered the man from "nowhere." "Well, you were cut off," said the Chicago man. "Ya-as, we were so," was the reply. "Still, the Chicago folks were just as badly off." "How so?" "Wa-al," drawled the man, "we didn't know what was going on in Chicago, of course. But then, neither did Chicago folks know what was going on down here."