re
contemporary with the _Canterbury Tales_.

A man said to me of three of our acquaintances: "There's been a fray on
the river--I don't know how the fraction begun, but Os feathered into
Dan and Phil, feedin' them lead." He meant fray in its original sense of
deadly combat, as was fitting where two men were killed. Fraction for
rupture is an archaic word, rare in literature, though we find it in
_Troilus and Cressida_. "Feathered into them!" Where else can we hear
to-day a phrase that passed out of standard English when "villainous
saltpetre" supplanted the long-bow? It means to bury an arrow up to the
feather, as when the old chronicler Harrison says, "An other arrow
should haue beene fethered in his bowels."

[Illustration: Photo by Arthur Keith

"Till the skyline blends with the sky itself."--Great Smokies. N. C.
from Mt. Collins.]

Our schoolmaster, composing a form of oath for the new mail-carrier,
remarked: "Let me study this thing over; then I can edzact it"--a verb
so rare and obsolete that we find it in no American dictionary, but only
in Murray.

A remarkable word, common in the Smokies, is dauncy, defined for me as
"mincy about eating," which is to say fastidious, over-nice. Dauncy
probably is a variant of daunch, of which the _Oxford New English
Dictionary_ cites but one example, from the _Townley Mysteries_ of
_circa_ 1460.

A queer term used by Carolina mountaineers, without the faintest notion
of its origin, is doney (long _o_) or doney-gal, meaning a sweetheart.
Its history is unique. British sailors of the olden time brought it to
England from Spanish or Italian ports. Doney is simply _dona_ or _donna_
a trifle anglicized in pronunciation. Odd, though, that it should be
preserved in America by none but backwoodsmen whose ancestors for two
centuries never saw the tides!

In the vocabulary of the mountaineers I have detected only three words
of directly foreign origin. Doney is one. Another is kraut, which is the
sole contribution to highland speech of those numerous Germans (mostly
Pennsylvania Dutch) who joined the first settlers in this region, and
whose descendants, under wondrously anglicized names, form to-day a
considerable element of the highland population. The third is sashiate
(French _chasse_), used in calling figures at the country dances.

There is something intrinsically, stubbornly English in the nature of
the mountaineer: he will assimilate nothing foreign. In the Smokies t