As an illustration of the fertility of Middle Tennessee, the field on the right has been in cultivation ninety years, has had no fertilizers except rotation and clover, and produced this year two crops of Irish potatoes of fifty and ninety barrels per acre, respectively.
My destination was the little village of Shady Grove, way up in the foothills, and yet down in a little valley thirty miles from nowhere. We reached it just before sunset, when the smoke began to curl up out of the chimneys for the evening meal, and I stopped on the high hill and looked down on the quiet scene. I have always held that it does a man good to get away from the sound of trade and traffic now and then, and for my part there is nothing that appeals to me so much as to look down on one of these little villages in the hills and speculate on the simple life that exists there. So free from the knockout battles of the modern life, so simple and quiet and wanting so little. There is the school house, yonder the quaint little church which means so much to them and, whether narrow, quaint or clannish, we must admit are the real bulwarks of all the great moral structures that are the strength and pride and glory of twentieth century progress. The little homes cluster around these two. Once a day the mail boy rides over the hills on his pacing horse, with the thoughts of the rest of the world in his leathern pouch. In the twilight I could see that the village blacksmith, a sturdy, handsome young fellow, was forging a horse-shoe. A pretty girl came out of the little postoffice and locked the door. She stopped at the blacksmith’s as she passed and they laughed and made love. I smiled as I drove on, and said: “This is the glorious twentieth century with all its knowledge and science and progress, and yet when we come to think of it we are right where we were two hundred years ago, for in spite of engines and automobiles the two things that progress must have first of all, before she can move a foot—is a horse-shoe and—love.”
My destination was three miles farther—at Hen Island—but, when I reached it night had set in and, to my astonishment, I saw neither camp nor canoe. It is one hundred miles by river to Hen Island, a fine all-day and all-night float, with plenty of geese and ducks. The canoe had started down with the Old Hunter and Mr. Jackson, the setter dog and the camping outfit, and I expected them to meet me with a full game bag, and to have the camp pitched and supper ready. Instead, I sat alone on the banks of a river, in the chill of a winter’s evening, out in the woods, and with no prospect of anything but the ground to sleep on. I had begun to feel uneasy and dreadfully lonesome, when I noticed a native come down to water the mule he was riding. In answer to my inquiry he said that the Old Hunter had landed there that morning and had tacked a card on the sycamore tree near where I stood. I struck a match and soon deciphered the old man’s peculiar spelling, which told me he had gone on two miles further to camp at a better place.
A camp-fire at night will draw two months’ work and worry out of a man. How grand the trees look in the big, weird flashes of the firelight in front of the tent! The setter dog is at home and welcomes you with his honest bark and playful gambols. You can smell the fine flavor of the boiling coffee (does any other ever taste so good?) a quarter of a mile before you get to it, while the odor that comes up from the “skillet” is enough to bring every wolf out of the woods. In addition to all this the Old Hunter had two barbecued squirrels and, best of all, a mallard which he had cooked in his own inimitable way. That is to say, he had dressed it, all except taking off the feathers. Then he had pasted a wet clay all over it, wrapped it in wet paper and buried it just under the sod of the camp fire. In two hours it was pronounced done, and then he had taken it out, soon after I came up, and with a few hefty touches had peeled the clay and feathers off, with the skin. You may not think this is good until you eat it at camp; then you will not want to eat duck any other way.
The night had grown intensely dark, it seemed to me. The setter was asleep by the camp-fire, the river sang a surly song as it swept by in the blackness and ever and anon the “konk” of a flock of wild geese sounded from out the heavens as if they still flew about, disdaining to go to roost. In my vanity I supposed that they had heard that I had arrived and so concluded it was best to spend the night in the air.
We did not wish to start until nearly midnight and as we sat around the fire the Old Hunter grew mellow and reminiscent and this was one of the funny stories he told me.
“Talk about horses breakin’ the record, an’ all that, but do you kno’ that in my young days I broke all the records that ever was an’ ever will be, s’fur as a pacin’ hoss is concerned? Whut’s Star Pointer’s time?” he asked.
I told him.
He grunted doubtfully. “Wal, I think I was sixteen an’ about as hefty a lad as ever plowed a furrer. Lemme see; I was either sixteen or it was the year my daddy was the proud father of his sixteenth child, I’ve forgotten which; but I had to work like an ox all week plowin’ in the new ground an’ gettin’ out stumps an’ all that, an’ if there was a boy or man in that settlement that could beat me breakin’ in a colt or hold a hand with me in a wrestlin’ match, I don’t remember it jis’ now. We had one holiday an’ that was Sunday afternoons, which we spent mostly in breakin’ in of colts. Wal, one Sunday we struck the meanest-tempered colt that ever come down the pike. He flung Bill, an’ he flung Jim, an’ then he flung the old man hisse’f. They was all older than me, of course, an’ when he flung the old man it made him bilin’ hot an’ he sez: ‘Dam sech a colt es that! I’ll give ennybody a dollar that will stay on his back a minnit!’