Greer attended grade school and received his musical training in Boston. There is some Massachusetts colour in this story of the Great Lakes, but the most notable influence is the author's positive opinion about having ready culture, producible at any moment.

       While the story is beyond melodramatic, Greer, then a private music instructor in Los Angeles, emphasizes how well received is a trained singing voice, and how socially effective is spontaneous poetic recitation. Dido learns that Miss Bradshaw's given name is Margaret, on only their second meeting(!), because of a sympathetic current established, in part, by an oral exchange of poems.

       In fact, the story's style makes much more sense if one regards it as a dramatic recitation by one voice with appropriate gesturing. It even includes the narration, Grecian-like, of the most dramatic events occuring off-stage.

       We have put more effort into transcribing this story than the casual reader might think it deserves, because, we find, that "lesser" stories can illuminate a literary period as much as the great successes of the day.

Prof H D Greer's story was "serialized" (i.e., "chopped up") in 1918. Read "DIDO THE HERO" here.

 

       The California Eagle [Los Angeles, 1914-1964] was a Black weekly. The blotched and incomplete printing of this short story is not unusual for small newspapers. The short story's cruel rendition into a newspaper serial (over five weeks!) presumes an audience with good reading habits, patience and a knack for continuity, superior to that of a modern audience. The paper improved thru the years, eventually serializing Richard Wright's Native son in the early 1940's!

       We have tried to regularize the erratic punctuation and spelling (even the author's name is sometimes misspelled), while maintaining what might have been local or contemporary treatments. We did not adjust, for example, "sythe" or "effeminancy", but at "presture virtues" we just gave up.