gray
cabins, the clear bright water on the race, the silent forests, the
billows of laurel, the song of the brown thrashers, the shy children
in a dusky doorway, the lean pigs not shy at all, the bloodroot
underfoot, the soft, hazy sky overhead, the sense that here life was
always as it is, and always will be, with no change but the changing
seasons. I remember once more how I met the Spring at Thumping Dick,
like a dryad dancing through the wood, caught her in the very act of
climbing up from the cove below to find a road to take her north. So
we loitered together for one whole, blissful day, and when I came back
to the college campus I wore her violets in my hat.

But first I must tell you how Thumping Dick Hollow got its name. That
is more important even than knowing where it is. Many, many years ago,
so long ago that all traces of his cabin have disappeared, a man
called Dick dwelt beside the little brown brook which flows through a
slight hollow on its way to the cove below. Now, this Dick was averse
to over-much effort, unless it were effort connected with the pursuit
of bears or panther, and being of an ingenious turn of mind he
invented a labor-saving device to pound his corn. (Unfortunately, he
still had to grow it himself.) He took a hollow log and pivoted it
across the brook, at a little fall, in such a way that the upper end
would rest in the water while the lower end projected over the rocks
below the falls. Then he fastened a board across the lower half of
this lower opening, and underneath the log, also at the lower end, he
fixed a pestle. He then placed his mortar on a stone directly
beneath. The water, flowing into the hollow log, ran to the lower end
and piled up against the board till there was weight enough to tip the
entire log down. Then enough ran out to tilt the log back again. Of
course, each time the lower end of the log descended the pestle struck
a blow in the mortar. All Dick had to do was now and then to empty out
his pounded grain and put in a fresh supply. The log kept at its
solemn seesaw night and day, its dull thumps resounding through the
woods. So Thumping Dick Hollow it is to this day, and being close to
Sewanee, Tennessee, instead of New York City, Thumping Dick Hollow it
will remain, instead of becoming the Pratt Street section of Elmhurst
Manor.

To be precise, it is four miles from Sewanee, and to be more precise,
Sewanee is eight miles straight up hill from Cowan, and to be s