“Of course. I saw him leave you. I’ll bet my last dollar that he has inside of him a mad-stone as big as your fist!” Then shaking his head, and talking half aloud to himself; “Strange, strange, strange! Fifteen years old, and still alive!”
I did not attempt to scatter his superstition by telling that in reality I had hit the buck, and that it was wholly due to my poor marksmanship that he escaped. Sanford then told how he had topped a doe at his stand and killed her,—the only game secured that day. In the afternoon the Rose brothers brought it with our horses, as we had directed, to the house of Daniel Lester.
Lester’s is an unpretentious, double log house, situated in the center of a tract of cultivated hill-side land on the north or east bank of the Little Tennessee, thirty-three miles from Charleston, North Carolina, and three miles from the Tennessee state line. It is approached by a good wagon-road from Charleston, or from Marysville, Tennessee, the head of the nearest railroad. The view from the door-way is of exquisite beauty, especially towards evening when the wine-red October sun is sinking amid the clouds beyond the mountain summits at the far end of the river, and pours a dying glory over the scene. Daniel Lester is a man of prominence in the county. His is a North Carolinian hospitality, and we will always hold in pleasant remembrance our short stay at his humble dwelling.
The most pleasant time of the hunt is the evening of the hunt, when darkness has fallen, all the party is within the same doors, a rousing fire roars and leaps in the great, open chimney, and flings its light in every face, the faucet of the cider-barrel is turned at intervals, chestnuts are bursting on the hot hearth-stones, and after every man in his turn has recounted his day’s experience, the oldest hunter of the group tells his most thrilling “varmint” stories, till the flames die down to glowing coals, and midnight proclaims the end of the day in which we were after the antlers.
NATURAL RESOURCES.
“I’d kind o’ like to have a cot
Fixed on some sunny slope; a spot,
Five acres, more or less,
With maples, cedars, cherry-trees,
And poplars whitening in the breeze.”
HAT clever humorist, Mark Twain, represents himself as once patriotically telling the Secretary of the Treasury, that his annual report was too dry, too statistical; that he ought to get some jokes into it, wood cuts, at least; people read the almanac for the fun, etc. The humorist’s idea is not new. It was unintentionally put into practice by a much respected old geographer, who wrote the statistical treatise on the earth’s surface, which occupied many long hours of our pleasure loving youth, in obstinate efforts at memorizing. That venerable book contained, with wood cuts and all, probably the most successful joke in school literature. We remember this sentence: “The staple productions of North Carolina are tar, pitch, resin, and turpentine.” The picture represented a gloomy forest, a rude still, and a group of dirty men. A crowd of later writers of school geographies have thought this canard on a great state, with varied industries, too good to be lost, but remembering that every ounce of fiction, to be palatable, must contain a drachm of truth, added lumber. It has now been stereotyped, “pitch, tar, turpentine, and lumber.” If anyone has been fooled by the books of his youth, six hours travel from the coast westward, during which he will see broad fields of corn and plantations of cotton and tobacco, will lead him to an appreciation of the “tar-heel joke.” North Carolina does lead all the states in the production of resin and turpentine, but that industry does not employ one-thirtieth of her active capital, nor constitute one-fifteenth of her gross production. Her lumber resources constitute a real and important source of wealth and will receive some attention in this sketch.