“Do you know who those fellows were?” asked my companion, as we cantered up the gravelly hill; “my man told me that they were both preachers.”
“Preachers!” I said. “I took them for moonshiners at the very least.”
But now and then a vehicle so strange as to bring a laugh upon the faces of even the neighbors will come down from the backwoods. The cart will have only two large heavy wheels, and these alone of all its parts will be shop-made. The massive axle-tree, and pole or shafts and the rough box were made at home—perhaps wholly chopped out with an axe and fastened together with wooden pins. You must not expect to see a horse or a span of horses drawing this odd, unpainted cart—if the owner has horses, he probably considers them worthy of the saddle only—but oxen, or an ox and cow, or only one of either sex; I heard, indeed, of one case where a cow and a donkey were hitched up together, but that was certainly extraordinary. A single cow in the traces makes the funniest picture, I think. The harness will be partly leather, partly rope, perhaps eked out with twisted bark, and from the horns a single thin rope goes back to the driver, who can thus keep his beast awake by frequent jerks. Sometimes when the mountaineer and his wife go to market they place a couple of splint chairs in the cart to sit on, like a small edition of the celebrated Florida “gondola,” but as a rule there is no seat—to make one permanently would be altogether too much trouble,—and the man and his family all huddle together in the bottom of the jolting box.
A MOUNTAIN CONVEYANCE.
Until lately these mountain people made nearly all the clothes they wore. They had hand-looms which they built themselves, and it was the occupation of the women at all spare moments to spin the flax or the wool, to dye the yarn and weave the cloth. These looms are just the same rough picturesque old machines that used to be seen all over the country before the Revolution, but which now exist only in some out of the way corners, like this Blue Ridge region. Before the year’s weaving begins the whole house presents a gay appearance, for from every peg and place where they can be hung depend brightly colored hanks of yarn ready for the loom.
The ordinary dress of the men now is this tough homespun dyed butternut color; nearly all the bed-linen and under-clothing, also, of the mountain people, is still made by them. But the women’s calico dresses are bought at the village store and made after very wonderful patterns. The only head dress is the universal Shaker sun-bonnet. On Sundays, however, if some travelling preacher happens along and holds service in the tumble down meeting-house at the four corners, you will see black store clothes of ancient make, while the gayest of ribbons and flaunting feathers bedeck the red-cheeked and happy-hearted lassies. But this happens only once in four weeks or so, for the neighborhoods are too thinly settled and poor to support a steady minister.
A MOUNTAIN LASS.
Though so far behind the times in all that seems civilized and comfortable, though so ignorant of what is going on in the great world outside of their blue, beautiful mountains, and so utterly unlearned, these mountain people are warm-hearted, generous, independent in thought and faithful to a friend. They know that they are strong of frame, and have a profound contempt for those who live outside in the lowlands, even for those who live anywhere in towns, of the ways of which they know and care nothing at all. What is a man good for, they wonder, who can’t ride a wild colt, or follow easily the trail of a wolf, or even track a bee to its tree? Even the women regard the men of the lower country as effeminate. A hunting party from South Carolina were up at Mt. Jonah one day, when they found themselves being greatly laughed at by a young woman there, who proposed to take the largest of them on her shoulders and then run a foot-race; she said she could beat them all, thus weighted. On another occasion this same girl was seen coming out of a gorge with a rifle in her hand, her sleeves rolled up and her arms covered with blood. Upon being questioned she carelessly replied that she’d “killed a bar jest beyant the Terapin!”