enerate into caricature. Wherever I
tell anything that is unusual or below the average of backwoods life, I
give fair warning that it is admitted only for spice or contrast, and
let it go at that. But even in writing with severe restraint it will be
necessary at times to show conditions so rude and antiquated that
professional apologists will growl, and many others may find my
statements hard to credit as typical of anything at all in our modern
America.

So, let me remind the reader again that full three-fourths of our
mountaineers still live in the eighteenth century, and that in their
far-flung wilderness, away from large rivers and railways, the habits,
customs, morals of the people have changed but little from those of our
old colonial frontier; in essentials they are closely analogous to what
we read of lower-class English and Scottish life in Covenanter and
Jacobite times.

CHAPTER X

THE PEOPLE OF THE HILLS

In delineating a strange race we are prone to disregard what is common
in our own experience and observe sharply what is odd. The oddities we
sketch and remember and tell about. But there is little danger of
misrepresenting the physical features and mental traits of the hill
people, because among them there is one definite type that greatly
predominates. This is not to be wondered at when we remember that fully
three-fourths of our highlanders are practically of the same descent,
have lived the same kind of life for generations, and have intermarried
to a degree unknown in other parts of America.

Our average mountaineer is lean, inquisitive, shrewd. If that be what
constitutes a Yankee, as is popularly supposed outside of New England,
then this Yankee of the South is as true to type as the conventional
Uncle Sam himself.

A fat mountaineer is a curiosity. The hill folk even seem to affect a
slender type of comeliness. In Alice MacGowan's _Judith of the
Cumberlands_, old Jepthah Turrentine says of one of his sons: "I named
that boy after the finest man that ever walked God's green earth--and
then the fool had to go and git fat on me! Think of me with a _fat_ son!
I allers did hold that a fat woman was bad enough, but a fat man ort
p'intedly to be led out and killed!"

Spartan diet does not put on flesh. Still, it should be noted that long
legs, baggy clothing, and scantiness or lack of underwear make people
seem thinner than they really are. Our highlanders are conspicuously a
tall race. Ou