The women of the back country usually go bareheaded around home and often barefooted, too, as did the daughters of Highland chiefs a century or two ago, and for the same reason: simply that they feel better so. When “visit-in” or expecting visitors their extremities are clad. They make their own dresses and the style seems never to change. When traveling horseback they use a man’s saddle and ride astride in their ordinary skirts with an ingenuity of “tucking up” that is beyond my understanding (as no doubt it should be). Often one sees a man and a woman riding a-pillion, in which case the lady perches sidewise, of course.
If I were disposed to startle the reader, after the manner of impressionistic writers who strive after effect at any cost, I could fill a book with oddities observed in the mountains, and that without exaggeration by commission or omission. Let one or two anecdotes suffice; and then we will get back to our averages again. I took down the following incident verbatim (save for proper names) from lips that I know to be truthful. It is introduced here as a specimen of vivid offhand description in few words:
“There was a fam’ly on Pick-Yer-Flint that was named Higgins, and another named the McBees. They married through and through till the whole gineration nigh run out; though what helped was that they’d fly mad sometimes and kill one another like fools. They had great big heads and mottly faces—ears as big as sheepskins. Well, when they dressed up to come to church the men—grown men—’d have shirts made of this common domestic, with the letters AAA on their backs; and them barefooted, and some without hats, but with three yards of red ribbon around their necks. The sleeves of their shirts looked like a whole web of cloth jest sewed up together; and them sleeves’d git full o’ wind, and that red ribbon a-flyin’—O my la!
“There was lots o’ leetle boys of ’em that kem only in their shirt-tails. There was cracks between the logs that a dog could jump through, and them leetle fellers ’d git ’em a crack and grin in at us all through the sarmon. ’T ain’t no manner o’ use to ax me what the tex’ was that day!”
I may explain that it still is common in many districts of the mountain country for small boys to go about through the summer in a single abbreviated garment and that they are called “shirt-tail boys.”
Some of the expedients that mountain girls invent to make themselves attractive are bizarre in the extreme. Without invading the sanctities of toilet, I will cite one instance that is interesting from a scientific viewpoint. They told me that a certain blue-eyed girl thought that black eyes were “purtier” and that she actually changed her eyes to jet black whenever she went to “meetin’” or other public gathering. While I could see how the trick might be worked, it seemed utterly absurd that an unschooled maid of the wilderness could acquire either the knowledge or the means to accomplish such change. Well, one day I was called to treat a sick baby. While waiting for the medicine to react I chanced to mention this tale as it had been told me. The father, who had blue eyes, solemnly assured me that there was “no lie about it,” and said he would convince me in a few minutes.
He stepped to the garden and plucked a leaf of jimson weed. His wife crushed the leaf and instilled a drop of its juice into one of his eyes. I took out my watch. One side of the eyeball reddened slightly. The man said “hit smarts a leetle—not much.” Within fifteen minutes the pupil had expanded like a cat’s eye in the dark, leaving a rim of blue iris so thin as to be quite unnoticeable without close inspection. The eye consequently was jet black and its expression utterly changed. My host said it did not affect his vision materially, save that “things glimmer a bit.” I met him again the next day and he still was an odd-looking creature indeed, with one eye a light blue and the other an absolute black. The thing puzzled me until I recalled that the Latin name of jimson weed is Datura stramonium; then, in a flash, it came to me that stramonium is a powerful mydriatic.
If our man killer, hitherto mentioned, had had blue or gray eyes and had not chosen to stand trial, then, with a cake of soap and a new suit and a jimson leaf he might have made himself over so that his own mother would not have known him. These simple facts are offered gratis to writers of detective tales, whose stock of disguises nowadays is so threadbare and (pardon me) so absurd.
The mountain home of to-day is the log cabin of the American pioneer—not such a lodge as well-to-do people affect in Adirondack “camps” (which cost more than framed structures of similar size), but a pen that can be erected by four “corner men” in one day and is finished by the owner at his leisure. The commonest type is a single large room, with maybe a narrow porch in front and a plank door, a big stone chimney at one end, a single sash for a window at the other, and a seven or eight-foot lean-to at the rear for kitchen.
