ALTHOUGH the old South is rapidly passing, there are yet a few localities to which the rattle of modern machinery has not brought prosperity--where sandy reads wind leisurely over cotton fields, where darkies sing at evening in the old plant disturbed tranquillity atop the graveyard hickory. It is of such an Arcadian backwater that Mrs. Julia Peterkin writes in her new book, "Roll, Jordan, Roll," a charming series of sketches on the Gullahs of South Carolina.

The Gullahs are negroes, whose forefathers tilled the soil, reaped the harvests, and shined the boots of slave owners long before Emancipation; the present Gullahs perform the same homely functions today, and the Civil War, (the only war they recognize) has left them little changed. Indeed, the grizzled old deacons are constantly harking back to the good old days, and the occasional automobile seen in those parts is regarded with mild contempt by eyes which, in brighter days, have seen the Colonel spin swiftly past in his glittering coach and four.

The simple little character sketches which make up the body of the volume are of no monumental significance, but they are well done and gain much in atmosphere from the accompanying photographic studies of Miss Ulmann's. By centering her narratives around the lives and opinions of several colorful figures, here a benevolent old widower, there a noisy and witch-rapping harridan, Mrs. Peterkin has skillfully given a convincing portrayal of the community as a whole. The best of the individual portraits is that of the old negro foreman, whose duty it is to see that all runs smoothly on the plantation. Like Conrad's Nostromo among the cargadores, he stands erect and aloof from his fellows. His contempt for the "pobuckras," as the negroes term white people of mean extraction, is equalled only by the amused disdain in which he holds Yankees and other commercial persons. The little white church in the grove he has never entered.

Far different in this respect are the other negroes, who seem to be seldom outside the church. Where modern amusements are either too far different, too expensive, or too wicked, the meeting-house bell is heard by all. Mrs. Peterkin has depicted the peculiar religious zeal of the rural negro with humor and understanding. Her description of the frocked deacons, the collection plate en parade, "testifying," and the weird frenzy of the confessional "stomp" seem incredible to one who has not witnessed these things first hand. A more lofty spiritual tone pervades the sonorous "lining out" of hymns to those who cannot read, but all these things have more than a semblance of the barbaric creeds which they may have supplanted.

Mrs. Peterkin, as in "Scarlet Sister Mary," treats her subject with great delicacy. her familiarity with the dialect and temperament of the Southern plantation negroes is everywhere evident, and there is in her manner a great deal of the idyllic charm which distinguishes the dialect stories of Joel Chandler Harris. Happily this book does not attempt an expose of social conditions. Rather it catches an aspect of the American Scene which will not long be with us, and one which literature has seldom illumined with any degree of veracity.