people in the South are more local and provincial than in the North. For
the most part, in certain sections, at least, the county builds the
roads (macadam), and not the State. Hence you pass from a fine stone
road in one county on to a rough dirt road in the next. Toll-gates
appear. In one case we paid toll at the rate of two cents a mile for the
cars, and five cents for the trucks. Grist-mills are seen along the way,
driven by overshot wheels, and they are usually at work. A man or a boy
on horseback, with a bag of grain or of meal behind him, going to or
returning from the mill, is a frequent sight; or a woman on horseback,
on a sidesaddle, with a baby in her arms, attracts your attention. Thus
my grandmother went to mill in pioneer days in the Catskills.

The absence of bridges over the small streams was to us a novel feature.
One of the party called these fording places, "Irish bridges." They are
made smooth and easy, and gave us no trouble. Another Southern feature,
indicating how far behind our Northern and more scientific farming the
South still is, are the groups of small haystacks in the meadows with
poles sticking out of their tops, letting the rain and the destructive
bacteria into their hearts. Among the old-fashioned features of the
South much to be commended are the large families. In a farmhouse near
which we made camp one night there were thirteen children, the eldest of
whom was at the front in France. The schools were in session in late
August, and the schoolrooms were well filled with pupils.

No doubt there are many peculiar local customs of which the hurrying
tourist gets no inkling. At a station in the mountains of North Carolina
a youngish, well-clad countryman, smoking his pipe, stood within a few
feet of my friend and me and gazed at us with the simple, blank
curiosity of a child. There was not the slightest gleam of intelligent
interest, or self-consciousness in his face; it was the frank stare of a
five-year-old boy. He belongs to a type one often sees in the mountain
districts of the South--good human stuff, valiant as soldiers, and
industrious as farmers, but so unacquainted with the great outside
world, their unsophistication is shocking to see.

It often seemed to me that we were a luxuriously equipped expedition
going forth to seek discomfort, for discomfort in several forms--dust,
rough roads, heat, cold, irregular hours, accidents--is pretty sure to
come to those who go a-gypsying i