AN AMERICAN BACKWATER. IF there is any one who thinks that the stream of progress in the United States has been so rushing and fullflooded that it has overspread the whole continent, and found its way into every last corner of the land, he can correct that mistake by hunting up certain localities, and that without travelling to the remote wildernesses of the West. One of these unruffled, behind-theworld backwaters, that immigration and advancement have always swept by, is to be found in the Appalachian Range, in some of whose nooks conditions exist to-day that are a revelation. The land - seeking tidal wave has always naturally rolled to the flatter-lying lands of the middle and western States, leaving much of the Appalachians all undisturbed, and among the inhabitants of these mountains there are many of whom it can undoubtedly be said that they are direct and undiluted in their descent from some batch of the colonists planted by Sir Walter Raleigh on American soil. A certain amount of outside blood may have been introduced into some families, in course of their inland migration, by reason of their having possibly run across, and mixed with, one or other of the small early-day colonies of German and Swiss origin; but any such adulteration, if it took place, must have been of the slightest. Equally with many Virginians, they might lay claim, though this may be not so readily traceable, to "first family" distinctions. They are, however, a people who have about as little interest in a genealogical tree as an average untutored, unhistoried savage, and they are unlikely ever to cause the blue-blooded Virginian any concern by furnishing proof of title to share honours with him. Back in the old stirring days of Virginia and the Carolinas, when the English Monarchs and the Lords Proprietors were juggling with the real estate, these people's sturdy ancestors were growing cotton and tobacco on the coast. After a while the bolder spirits, fretting under the tithes and imposts laid upon them, began to strike out for themselves. Gradually, away from the coastal plain, through the great swamps, back and farther back into the country they moved, pushing aside the red-skinned Cherokee and Chickahominy as occasion required, and forcibly at times persuading these high-spirited aborigines that wigwams were made for packing up, and that the face of the earth was as fitted for the double-shovel plough of the white man for the whoop and doubleshuffle of the war-dance. Byand-by they reached the Blue Ridge, and up and over that they climbed into the forested highlands beyond. There, all the while clearing and cropping, they laid claims on the land, and settled down, and there, in certain districts, they still stay, earning a livelihood on the now lean and loamless hillsides, by methods of husbandry primitive as those of the Old Testament. of many mountain regions, the sameness of its endless unevenness, and the hemmed-in feeling it engenders, palls on one after a short residence there. Standing high up on the hillsides or squatting down in the depths Some sections of the Appal- between, everywhere is the achian country are by nature homestead of the settler. By better adapted for agriculture the death of the old, and the than others, and are conse- distribution of properties by quently more prosperous, en- inheritance, the land year by lightened, and advanced than year has got parcelled up into the more rugged and poorer smaller and smaller holdings. localities. In these last, how- Up and down, through, over, and ever, the outsider can find across the country, chopping most of characteristic interest. and slicing it into a fantastic Take a typical district, and checker-board, everywhere runs you find yourself at an average the panel rail fence of crooked elevation of some three to four or straight, wormed or nailed thousand feet above sea-level, pattern, boundary - lining the in a distracting confusion of different claims, and subdividpart - tilled, part-timbered ing each of these into small ridges, knolls, heights, and fields and pasture enclosures. hillocks, many of them full- So small are the holdings blown miniature mountains in commonly, that the houses, themselves, each springing while not within view of each from the base of the next, other, owing to the already deleaving but the merest strip scribed contour of the country, of stream bottom or 66 cove are within easy "hollering land intervening, and all distance. In the mountain thrown down topsy-turvy atmosphere sound waves carry and at random, giving a gen- well, and mountain lungs, too, eral effect to the eye of what are lusty. The mountain worka sailor would call on the ocean ox also is contrary, and is a "a lumpy cross sea with the quadruped recognised, by even tide in its teeth." Doubtless the pious-minded, to be needful the geologist could glibly of loud and profane speech as account for the strange a corrective in his moments of aspect of the physical geo- waywardness. Thus when field graphy, by explaining that operations are being carried on the cooling down process, simultaneously, in several adwhile things were in a molten jacent farms, you can stand in state of ebullition, had been too one spot and clearly hear the rapid, and that the blisters and expostulations of a number of bubbles were arrested ere they teamsters all at the same time: had time to settle. Decidedly the effect on a morally sensibeautiful scenery, but lacking tive ear is sometimes weirdly in the grandeur and sublimity shocking. tired and not feeling too good- In manners and customs the native is a "back - number." But a few brief hours' run from New York City, pulsating fierce and hot with the latest-up-todate in all things, we have left the railroad, and now with but an additional day and a half's road waggon journey from civilisation, we are here in a region, close settled as a European lowland, but where one may set back his watch, and his mental arrangements conformably, a full century, and still be abreast of the local time. Indications of this are at once apparent. The stare of the man who still stands rooted to the roadway, back there in our wake, tells its tale. There is nothing furtive about that stare. Its unblinking curiosity, so full of rustic ingenuousness as to disarm offence, speaks volumes. You, a stranger, are here in his country, sojourning within his gates-you have found your way, somehow, right into his Appalachian family party, and that all "unbeknownst" to him. Not that he is resentful, but he has the right to see and know about it, and means to do so. Given half a chance in passing, he would have shown you what a master of interrogatory he was, and, provided you were responsive to his straight-fromthe-shoulder queries, how soon he could turn you inside out. After a cheery "Howdy," following in the lines of the Anglican catechism, he would open with: "What might your name be.' This conundrum you could of course at once solve if you would; but perhaps you are same identical questions to ex you, and you wonder and doubt and get uneasy. Are they on vigilance committee duty, or are they secret society agents, or what? With the second fellow, anyhow, it is best for you to be frank. When he starts on you just make a clean breast of it. Tell him at once "all is already discovered," and refer him to the first inquisitor back up the road for full particulars. It will save time for all parties. When you have occasion to ask any inhabitant for road directions in finding your way anywhere, you of course subject yourself to the regular course of investigation, but he is always courteous and painstaking in giving the needful instructions, and should he find that you, as a non-resident, cannot follow his itinerary, in your ignorance of which house referred to is "Cousin Elihu's," and which estate corner referred to is "Granpaw's," he drops his work and willingly escorts you himself a part of the way. This accommodating arrangement affords him an opportunity to attend to any little detail he may have overlooked before in getting up your personal history. Like all the others, he extends to you an invite to call on him when you can. Commonly speaking, it is well for the stranger to go slow in the matter of acceptance of the customary proffer of hospitality. Too often an ability to entertain, on the part of the native, goes in the inverse ratio to his hospitable disposition. When the inviter is most cordially insistent, it should be taken as a dangersignal by the invitee. A heedless good-natured acceptance of a night's entertainment, without a gentle preliminary inquiry as to the ways and means of the inviter to make good, may involve the acceptor in things he thought not of. When, in his whole-souled way, your easy-going host opens his door and tells you to make yourself at home, he means you to do so. And you do. Right straightway into the very lap and bosom of that household you drop. The one room of the establishment may be of goodly enough proportions, but so, too, is the size of the family, and the apartment does duty for dining, sitting, and sleeping purposes. True, the table fare is plenteous, but the aroma of the fatted possum, killed in your honour and prepared in your presence, sticks in your nostril, and the semi-baked "corn-dodger" slabs stick in your throat, so you fill up on string-beans, dally some with the "sass," and drown your sorrows in the flowing bowl of buttermilk. Towards the family retiring hour, which comes shortly after the customary roosting-time of a sober-living barnyard fowl, you begin to wonder where and how everybody is going to find sleeping quarters. This gives you not a little concern. You size up the roster of the family rank and file, and the visible beds, and call to mind the incident of the frontiersman who, in bestowing his guest for the night, handed him a bull's hide with the remark, "You kin snug up wi' that, pardner; I reckon I'll tough it on the floor." Your host does you better than this, for he appoints you to a good bed, in a nice conspicuous place. If there is any embarrassment as the household-ladies included -begins to retire, it will be entirely on your side. Even while you are getting to feel queer about it, and are meditating making your escape somewhere, half the members of the family have shed their shoes and some fraction of outer apparel, and are under their respective covers in beds or on shake-downs on the floor. Encouraged by the casual way things are done, you nerve yourself up, remove as much of your raiment as you deem judicious, and turn in too. Then the old man blows out the light. In the morning it's all right, for every one is up long before day. Most of the farm land is steep and rocky in the extreme. Watching, for the first time, a ploughman moving across the top storey of one of his skyscraper fields, looking for all the world like a fly on the side of a house, gives you a catch of the breath, and makes you think what a truly blessed thing it is that so many treestumps have been left standing on the ground below him, for fear he should by chance overbalance and topple out. But practice has taught him to keep his equilibrium, and hunched up and humped over to the high side, he hirples along between the handles of his awkward hillside plough, and is happy. And the corn crop he is preparing for, what a laborious process it is. From his first gymnastics on that mountain face, then planting, and on through the multifarious hoeings and cultivatings, and then stripping, pulling, cutting, shocking, and shucking, it is a tedious round that keeps sweat beads on the brow of himself and family for many long summer months. Providence in her kind dispensation has fortunately blessed him with a sufficiency of family to help him out, his offspring not infrequently numbering ten or a dozen. Wherever else it may be in vogue, race-suicide cannot be laid to the charge of the people of the Appalachians. They multiply and replenish exceedingly, finding names for the males, as they arrive, from the Hebrew prophets, and for the females nice plain ones from the Puritan Mothers. Boys and girls marry early. Perhaps the lad has gone off for a while, and earned a little money toward setting him up with a work-steer and a milk cow; or the parents equip him after a fashion, and allot him a knuckle-end of their claim, where the youthful couple settle down and commence housekeeping. Marrying is easy and casual. Hence juvenile grandparents are common as ground-squirrels, and ramifications of blood relationships soon get to be bewildering. Consanguinity through close marriage, however, does not, as might be expected, appear to bring about much evil result, for the rising generations |