E WALL

I was born under the Blue Ridge, and under that side which is blue in
the evening light, in a wild land of game and forest and rushing waters.
There, on the borders of a creek that runs into the Yadkin River, in a
cabin that was chinked with red mud, I came into the world a subject of
King George the Third, in that part of his realm known as the province
of North Carolina.

The cabin reeked of corn-pone and bacon, and the odor of pelts. It had
two shakedowns, on one of which I slept under a bearskin. A rough stone
chimney was reared outside, and the fireplace was as long as my father
was tall. There was a crane in it, and a bake kettle; and over it great
buckhorns held my father's rifle when it was not in use. On other horns
hung jerked bear's meat and venison hams, and gourds for drinking
cups, and bags of seed, and my father's best hunting shirt; also, in a
neglected corner, several articles of woman's attire from pegs. These
once belonged to my mother. Among them was a gown of silk, of a fine,
faded pattern, over which I was wont to speculate. The women at the
Cross-Roads, twelve miles away, were dressed in coarse butternut wool
and huge sunbonnets. But when I questioned my father on these matters he
would give me no answers.

My father was--how shall I say what he was? To this day I can only
surmise many things of him. He was a Scotchman born, and I know now that
he had a slight Scotch accent. At the time of which I write, my early
childhood, he was a frontiersman and hunter. I can see him now, with his
hunting shirt and leggings and moccasins; his powder horn, engraved with
wondrous scenes; his bullet pouch and tomahawk and hunting knife. He
was a tall, lean man with a strange, sad face. And he talked little save
when he drank too many "horns," as they were called in that country.
These lapses of my father's were a perpetual source of wonder to
me,--and, I must say, of delight. They occurred only when a passing
traveller who hit his fancy chanced that way, or, what was almost as
rare, a neighbor. Many a winter night I have lain awake under the
skins, listening to a flow of language that held me spellbound, though I
understood scarce a word of it.

"Virtuous and vicious every man must be,
Few in the extreme, but all in a degree."

The chance neighbor or traveller was no less struck with wonder. And
many the time have I heard the query, at the Cross-Roads and elsewhere,
"Whar Alec Trimble