no less a reward, for they will have
lightened for all around them the burdens of life, they will have
smoothed the gathering frown and summoned the forgotten laugh, they
will have made of the ridiculous a little religion, and out of
Penguinity brought peace.

[Illustration]

_Spring Comes to Thumping Dick_

When the ordinary American who "does things"--atrocious phrase, symbol
of our unrecking materialism that does not consider the value of the
things done--wants to give a place a name, he affixes his own, or that
of his sister-in-law or the congressman from his district. Thus our
noblest North American mountain is called McKinley, though it already
bore a beautiful Indian name--Denali, "The Great One"; and thus in
Glacier Park we find a Lake McDermott, a Lake McDonald, and a Mount
Jackson, to contrast painfully with such beautiful titles as
Going-to-the-Sun Mountain, Rising Wolf Mountain, and Morning Eagle
Falls. The Indians expressed their poetry in their names. The pioneers
and the colonial rural Americans expressed, if not poetry, at least a
fine, spicy flavor of the local tradition; their names grew out of the
place. In the corner of New England where I was born we had a Slab
City, a Tearbreeches Hill, a Puddin' P'int--well-flavored names, all
of them, descriptive and significant, even the last, which strangers
mispronounced Pudding Point. Even in old New York there were once such
names rich in historical association as Long Acre Square, now reduced
to Times Square to please the vanity or cupidity of a newspaper. But,
save the Indians, no body of people on this continent, not even the
old-time cowboys and prospectors with their Bright Angel Trail, have
ever rivaled the southern highlanders, the mountain folk of the Blue
Ridge, the Great Smokies and the Cumberlands, in the bestowal of
picturesque titles. It is hard, sometimes, to say whether the southern
mountaineers are poets or humorists or realists; they may be one or
the other, or all three at once. But they never fail with the
inevitable appellation. Not Flaubert with his one right word, not the
school "gang" with its nicknames, can equal them.

Thumping Dick Hollow, Milk-sick Hollow, Little Fiery Gizzard Creek,
Falling Water Cove, Maniac's Hell, Lost Creek Cove, Jump Off Point,
Rainbow Hollow, Slaughterpen Hollow--they come back to me in
picturesque array, and with them come back the memories of the