han a
narrow sled. Quill Rose had not even a sledpath, but journeyed full five
miles by trail to the nearest wagon road.

Medlin itself comprised two little stores built of rough planks and
bearing no signs, a corn mill, and four dwellings. A mile and a half
away was the log schoolhouse, which, once or twice a month, served also
as church. Scattered about the settlement were seven tiny tub-mills for
grinding corn, some of them mere open sheds with a capacity of about a
bushel a day. Most of the dwellings were built of logs. Two or three,
only, were weatherboarded frame houses and attained the dignity of a
story and a half.

All about us was the forest primeval, where roamed some sparse herds of
cattle, razorback hogs, and the wild beasts. Speckled trout were in all
the streams. Bears sometimes raided the fields, and wildcats were a
common nuisance. Our settlement was a mere slash in the vast woodland
that encompassed it.

The post-office occupied a space about five feet square, in a corner of
one of the stores. There was a daily mail, by rider, serving four other
communities along the way. The contractor for this service had to
furnish two horses, working turnabout, pay the rider, and squeeze his
own profit, out of $499 a year. In Star Route days the mail was carried
afoot, two barefooted young men "toting the sacks on their own wethers"
over this thirty-two-mile round trip, for forty-eight cents a day; and
they boarded themselves!

In the group that gathered at mail time I often was solicited to "back"
envelopes, give out the news, or decipher letters for men who could not
read. Several times, in the postmaster's absence, I registered letters
for myself, or for someone else, the law of the nation being suspended
by general consent.

Our stores, as I have said, were small, yet many of their shelves were
empty. Oftentimes there was no flour to be had, no meat, cereals, canned
goods, coffee, sugar, or oil. It excited no comment at all when Old Pete
would lean across his bare counter and lament that "Thar's lots o' folks
a-hurtin' around hyur for lard, and I ain't got none."

I have seen the time when our neighborhood could get no salt nor tobacco
without making a twenty-four-mile trip over the mountain and back, in
the dead of winter. This was due, partly, to the state of the roads, and
to the fact that there would be no wagon available for weeks at a time.
Wagoning, by the way, was no sinecure. Often it meant to c