V
The Gift of Tallulah
Go, you my brothers, whose hearts are in sore need of delight, and bathe in the falls of Tallulah. That experience will be for the foot-sore a balm, for the languid a lash, for the dry-throated pedant the very cup of nature. To those crushed by the inventions of cities, wounded by evil men, it will be a washing away of tears and of blood. Yea, it will be to them all, what it was to my heart that day, the sweet, sweet blowing of the reckless pipes of Pan.
THE GNOME
Let us now recall a certain adventure among the moonshiners.
When I walked north from Atlanta Easter morning, on Peachtree road, orchards were flowering everywhere. Resurrection songs flew across the road from humble blunt steeples.
Stony Mountain, miles to the east, Kenesaw on the western edge of things, and all the rest of the rolling land made the beginning of a gradual ascent by which I was to climb the Blue Ridge. The road mounted the watershed between the Atlantic and the gulf.
An old man took me into his wagon for a mile. I asked what sort of people I would meet on the Blue Ridge. He answered, “They make blockade whisky up there. But if you don’t go around hunting stills by the creeks, or in the woods away from the road, they’ll be awful glad to see you. They are all moonshiners, but if they likes a man they loves him, and they’re as likely to get to lovin’ you as not.”
When I was truly in the mountains, six days north of Atlanta, a day’s journey from the last struggling railway, the road wound into a certain high, uninhabited valley. Two days back, at a village I entered just after I had enjoyed the falls of Tallulah, I had found a letter from my new friend John Collier whom I had met in Macon and Atlanta. It contained a little money, which he insisted I should take, to make easier my way. I was inconsistent enough to spend some of it, instead of returning it or giving it “to the poor.”
I invested seventy-five cents in brogans made of the thickest leather. I had thought they were conquered the first day. But now one of them bit a piece out of my heel. John Collier has done noble things since. On my behalf, for instance, he climbed Mount Mitchell with me, and showed me half the glory of the South. Then and after, he has helped my soul with counsel and teaching. But he should not have corrupted a near-Franciscan with money for hoodoo brogans. Though it was fairly warm weather, if ever I rested five minutes, the heavy things stiffened like cooling metal.
The little streams I crossed scarcely afforded me a drink. Their dried borders had the foot-prints of swine on them.