On my way through the village, at noon, I passed the steer turned out to grass by the roadside, and had a better look at the harness, a simple, home-made affair, including a pair of hames. The driving-rope, which in its original estate might have been part of a clothes-line or a bed-cord, was attached to a chain which went round or over the creature’s head at the base of the horns. The lads themselves were farther down the street, and the younger one nudged the other’s elbow with a nod in my direction as I passed on the opposite sidewalk. They seemed to have sobered down at a wonderful rate since their arrival in the “city.” I should hardly have known them for the same boys; but no doubt they would wake the echoes again on the road homeward. I hoped so, surely, for I liked them best as I saw them first.
As far as the pleasure of life goes, boys brought up in this primitive mountain country have little to complain of. They may lack certain advantages; in this imperfect world, where two bodies cannot occupy the same space at once, the presence of some things necessitates the absence of others; but most certainly they have their full quota of what in youthful phrase are known as “good times.” The very prettiest sight that I saw in North Carolina, not excepting any landscape or flower,—and I saw floral displays of a splendor to bankrupt all description,—was a boy whom I met one Sunday morning in a steep, disused road outside of the town. I was descending the hill, picking my steps, and he was coming up. Eleven or twelve years old he might have been, cleanly dressed, fit for any company, but bare-legged to the knee. I wished him good-morning, and he responded with the easiest grace imaginable. “You are going to church?” said I. “Yes, sir,” and on he went up the hill, “progressing by his own brave steps;” a boy, as Thoreau says, who was “never drawn in a willow wagon;” straight as an arrow, and with motions so elastic, so full of the very spirit of youth and health, that I stood still and gazed after him for pure delight. His face, his speech, his manner, his carriage, all were in keeping. If he does not make a good and happy man, it will be an awful tragedy.
This boy was not a “cracker’s” child, I think. Probably he belonged to one of the Northern families, that make up the village for the most part, and have settled the country sparsely for a few miles round about. The lot of the native mountaineers is hard and pinched, and although flocks of children were playing happily enough about the cabin doors, it was impossible not to look upon them as born to a narrow and cheerless existence. Possibly the fault was partly in myself, since I have no very easy gift with strangers, but I found them, young and old alike, rather uncommunicative.
I recall a family group that I overtook toward the end of an afternoon; a father and mother, both surprisingly young-looking, hardly out of their teens, it seemed to me, with a boy of perhaps six years. They were resting by the roadside as I came up, the father poring over some written document. “You must have been to the city,” said I; but all the man could answer was “Howdy.” The woman smiled and murmured something, it was impossible to tell what. They started on again at that moment, the grown people each with a heavy bag, which looked as if it might contain meal or flour, and the little fellow with a big bundle. They had four miles still to go, they said; and the road, as I could see for myself, was of the very worst, steep and rugged to the last degree. Partly to see if I could conquer the man, and partly to please myself, I beckoned the youngster to my side and put a coin into his hand. The shot took effect at once. Father and mother found their voices, and said in the same breath, “Say thank you!” How natural that sounded! It is part of the universal language. Every parent will have his child polite. But the boy, poor thing, was utterly tongue-tied, and could only smile; which, after all, was about the best thing he could have done. The father, too, was still inclined to silence, finding nothing in particular to say, though I did my best to encourage him; but he took pains to keep along with me, halting whenever I did so, and making it manifest that he meant to be with me at the turn in the road, about which I had inquired (needlessly, there is no harm in my now confessing), so that I should by no possibility go astray. Nothing could have been more friendly, and at the corner both he and his wife bade me good-by with simple heartiness. “Good-by, little boy,” said I. “Tell him good-by,” called both father and mother; but the boy couldn’t, and there was an end of it. “He’s just as I was at his age; bashful, that’s all.” This little speech set matters right. The parents smiled, the boy did likewise, and we went our different ways, I still pitying the woman, with that heavy bag under her arm, having to make a packhorse of herself on that tiresome mountain road.
However, it is the mountain woman’s way to do her full share of the hard work, as I was soon to see farther exemplified; for within half a mile I heard in front of me the grating of a saw, and presently came upon another family group, in the woods on the mountain side,—a woman, three children, and a dog. The woman, no longer young, as we say in the language of compliment, was at one end of a cross-cut saw, and the largest boy, ten or eleven years old, was at the other. They were getting to pieces a huge fallen trunk. “Wood ought to be cheap in this country,” said I; and the woman, as she and the boy changed hands to rest themselves, answered that it was. In my heart I thought she was paying dearly for it; but her voice was cheerful, and the whole company was almost a merry one, the younger children laughing at their play, and the dog capering about them in high spirits. The mountain family may be poor, but not with the degrading, squalid poverty of dwellers in a city slum; and at the very worst the children have a royal playground.
Mountain boys, certainly, I could never much pity; for the girls it was impossible not to wish easier and more generous conditions. Here at Stewart’s Pond I detained two of them for a minute’s talk: sisters, I judged, the taller one ten years old, or thereabout. I asked them if there were many fish in the pond. The older one thought there were. “I know my daddy ketched five hundred and put in there for Mr. Stewart,” she said. Just then the younger girl pulled her sister’s sleeve and pointed toward two snakes which lay sunning themselves on the edge of the water, where a much larger one had shortly before slipped off a log into the pond at my approach. “They do no harm?” said I. “No, sir, I don’t guess they do,” was the answer; a strange-sounding form of speech, though it is exactly like the “I don’t think so” of which we all continue to make hourly use, no matter how often some crotchety amateur grammarian—for whom logic is logic, and who hates idiom as a mad dog hates water—may write to the newspapers warning us of its impropriety. Then the girls, barefooted, both of them, turned into a bushy trail so narrow that it had escaped my notice, and disappeared in the woods. I thought of the villainous-looking rattlesnake that I had seen the day before, freshly killed and tossed upon the side of the road, within a hundred rods of this point, and of the surprise expressed by a resident of the town at my wandering about the country without leggins.
As to the question of snakes and the danger from them, the people here, as is true everywhere in a rattlesnake country, held widely different opinions. Everybody recognized the presence of the pest, and most persons, whatever their own practice might be, advised a measure of caution on the part of strangers. One thing was agreed to on all hands: whoever saw a “rattler” was in duty bound to make an end of it; and one man told me a little story by way of illustrating the spirit of the community upon this point. A woman (not a mountain woman) was riding into town, when her horse suddenly stopped and shied. In the road, directly before her, a snake was coiled, rattling defiance. The woman dismounted, hitched the frightened horse to a sapling, cut a switch, killed the snake, threw it out of the road, remounted, and went on about her business. It is one advantage of life in wild surroundings that it encourages self-reliance.
In all places, nevertheless, and under all conditions, human nature remains a paradoxical compound. A mountain woman, while ploughing, came into close quarters with a rattlesnake. To save herself she sprang backward, fell against a stone, and in the fall broke her wrist. No doctor being within call, she set the bone herself, made and adjusted a rude splint, and now, as the lady who told me the story expressed it, “has a pretty good arm.” That was plucky. But the same woman suffered from an aching tooth some time afterward, and was advised to have it extracted. She would do no such thing. She couldn’t. She had a tooth pulled once, and it hurt her so that she would never do it again.
Anthropology and ornithology were very agreeably mingled for me on the Hamburg road,—though it seems impossible for me to stay there, the reader may say,—where passers-by were frequent enough to keep me from feeling lonesome, and yet not so numerous as to disturb the quiet of the place or interfere unduly with my natural historical researches. The human interview to which I look back with most pleasure was with a pair of elderly people who appeared one morning in an open buggy. They were driving from the town, seated side by side in the shadow of a big umbrella, and as they overtook me, on the bridge, the man said “Good-morning,” of course, and then, to my surprise, pulled up his horse and inquired particularly after my health. He hoped I was recovering from my indisposition, though I am not sure that he used that rather superfine word. I gave him a favorable account of myself,—wondering all the while how he knew I had been ill,—whereupon he expressed the greatest satisfaction, and his good wife smiled in sympathy. Then, after a word or two about the beauty of the morning, and while I was still trying to guess who the couple could be, the man gathered up the reins with the remark, “I’m going after some Ilex monticola for Charley.” “Yes, I know where it is,” he added, in response to a question. Then I knew him. I had been at his house a few evenings before to see his son, who had come home from Biltmore to collect certain rare local plants—the mountain holly being one of them—for the Vanderbilt herbarium. The mystery was cleared, but it may be imagined how taken aback I was when this venerable rustic stranger threw a Latin name at me.
In truth, however, botany and Latin names might almost be said to be in the air at Highlands. A villager met me in the street, one day, and almost before I knew it, we were discussing the specific identity of the small yellow lady’s-slippers,—whether there were two species, or, as my new acquaintance believed, only one, in the woods round about. At another time, having called at a very pretty unpainted cottage,—all the prettier for the natural color of the weathered shingles,—I remarked to the lady of the house upon the beauty of Azalea Vaseyi, which I had noticed in several dooryards, and which was said to have been transplanted from the woods. I did not understand why it was, I told her, but I couldn’t find it described in my Chapman’s Flora. “Oh, it is there, I am sure it is,” she answered; and going into the next room she brought out a copy of the manual, turned to the page, and showed me the name. It was in the supplement, where in my haste I had overlooked it. I wondered how often, in a New England country village, a stranger could happen into a house, painted or unpainted, and by any chance find the mistress of it prepared to set him right on a question of local botany.