e. The brooklet came from a disused
still-house hidden in laurel and hemlock so dense that direct sunlight
never penetrated the glen. Cold and sparkling and crystal clear, the
gushing water enticed every wayfarer to bend and drink, whether he was
thirsty or no. John is back in his own land now, and doubtless often
goes to drink of that veritable fountain of youth.

CHAPTER XI

THE LAND OF DO WITHOUT

Homespun jeans and linsey used to be the universal garb of the mountain
people. Nowadays you will seldom find them, except in far-back places.
Shoddy "store clothes" are cheaper and easier to get. And this is a
sorry change, for the old-time material was sound and enduring, the
direct product of hard personal toil, and so it was prized and taken
care of; whereas such stuff as a backwoodsman can buy in his crossroads
store is flimsy, soon loses shape and breaks down his own pride of
personal appearance. Our average hillsman now goes about in a dirty blue
shirt, wapsy and ragged trousers toggled up with a nail or two, thick
socks sagging untidily over rusty brogans, and a huge, black, floppy hat
that desecrates the landscape. Presently his hatband disappears, to be
replaced with a groundhog thong, woven in and out of knife slits, like a
shoestring.

When he comes home he "hangs his hat on the floor" until his wife picks
it up. He never brushes it. In time that battered old headpiece becomes
as pliant to its owner's whim, as expressive of his mood, as a clown's
cap in the circus. Commonly it is a symbol of shiftlessness and
unconcern. A touch, and it becomes a banner of defiance to law and
order. To meet on some lonesome road at night a horseman enveloped to
the heels in a black slicker and topped with one of those prodigious
funnels that conceals his features like a cowl, is to face the Ku Klux
or the Spanish Inquisition.

When your young mountaineer is properly filled up on corn liquor and
feels like challenging the world, the flesh, and the devil, he pins up
the front of his hat with a thorn, sticks a sprig of balsam or cedar in
the thong for an aigrette, and then gallops forth with bottle and pistol
to tilt against whatsoever may dare oppose him. And on the gray dawn of
the morning after you may find _that hat_ lying wilted in a corner, as
crumpled, spiritless and forlorn as--its owner, upon whom we charitably
drop the curtain.

I doubt, though, if anywhere in this wide world mere personal appearance
is mor