eat.

This man is worth over a hundred thousand dollars. He visited the
world's fairs at Chicago and St. Louis, wearing the old long coat that
serves him also as blanket, and carrying his rations in a sack. Far from
being demented, he is notoriously so shrewd on the stand and so learned
in the law that he is formidable to every attorney who cross-questions
him.

I cite these last two instances not merely as eccentricities of
character, but as really typical of the bodily stamina that most of the
mountaineers can display if they want to. Their smiling endurance of
cold and wet and privation would have endeared them to the first
Napoleon, who declared that those soldiers were the best who bivouacked
shelterless throughout the year.

In spite of such apparent "toughness," the mountaineers are not a
notably healthy people. The man who exposes himself wantonly year after
year must pay the piper. Sooner or later he "adopts a rheumatiz," and
the adoption lasts till he dies. So also in dietary matters. The
backwoodsmen through ruthless weeding-out of the normally sensitive have
acquired a wonderful tolerance of swimming grease, doughy bread and
half-fried cabbage; but, even so, they are gnawed by dyspepsia. This
accounts in great measure for the "glunch o' sour disdain" that mars so
many countenances. A neighbor said to me of another: "He has a gredge
agin all creation, and glories in human misery." So would anyone else
who ate at the same table. Many a homicide in the mountains can be
traced directly to bad food and the raw whiskey taken to appease a
soured stomach.

Every stranger in Appalachia is quick to note the high percentage of
defectives among the people. However, we should bear in mind that in the
mountains proper there are few, if any, public refuges for this class,
and that home ties are so powerful that mountaineers never send their
"fitified folks" or "half-wits," or other unfortunates, to any
institution in the lowlands, so long as it is bearable to have them
around. Such poor creatures as would be segregated in more advanced
communities, far from the public eye, here go at large and reproduce
their kind.

Extremely early marriages are tolerated, as among all primitive people.
I knew a hobbledehoy of sixteen who married a frail, tuberculous girl of
twelve, and in the same small settlement another lad of sixteen who
wedded a girl of thirteen. In both cases the result was wretched beyond
description.

The