FOOTNOTES:
[1] “Do come” and “did come” are proper enough; why not “done come”? And in point of fact, this common Southern use of “done” with the past participle has its warrant in at least two lines of Chaucer: in The Knightes Tale (1055):—
“Hath Theseus doon wrought in noble wise,”
and in The Tale of the Man of Lawe (171):—
“Thise marchants han doon fraught her shippes newe.”
If a ship is “done loaded,” why may not a carriage have “done come”? Idiom is long-lived. As Lowell said of the Yankee vernacular, so doubtless may we say of the Carolinian, that it “often has antiquity and very respectable literary authority on its side.”
[2] If I seem to have said too much about the vulgar question of something to eat, let it be my apology that for a Northern traveler in the rural South the food question is nothing less than the health question. A few years ago, two Boston ornithologists, who had undertaken an extensive tour among the North Carolina mountains, returned before the time. Sickness had driven them home, it turned out; and when they came to publish the result of their investigations, they finished their narrative by saying, “Few Northern digestions could accomplish the feat of properly nourishing a man on native fare.” On my present trip, a resident physician assured me that the native mountaineers, living mostly out of doors and in one of the best of climates, are almost without exception dyspeptics.
[3] See especially an article by Mrs. Olive Thorne Miller in The Atlantic Monthly for June, 1896.
[4] All things go by comparison. “I always lived in the country till I came here,” said my driver to me one day.
[5] The great “war governor” and senator of North Carolina was born among the mountains of the State; and from what I heard, he seems to have left his name