Opening title from Judge Priest (1934)

The figures in this story are familiar ghosts of my own boyhood. The War between the States was over,

but its tragedies and comedies haunted every grown man’s mind, and the stories that were swapped

took deep root in my memory. There was one man Down Yonder I came especially to admire for he

seemed typical of the tolerance of that day and the wisdom of that almost vanished generation.

I called him Judge Priest, and I tried to draw reasonably fair likenesses of him and his neighbors and the town

in which they lived.

An old Kentucky town in 1890.

Irvin S. Cobb