ere is a vast superfluity in all the Southern mountains. Unlike the
weak, timorous and stupid sheep, a flock of goats can fight their own
battles against wild animals. They are hardy in any weather, and thrive
from their own pickings where other foragers would starve.

A good milch goat gives more and richer milk than the average mountain
cow. And a kid yields excellent fresh meat in _manageable_ quantity, at
a time when no one would butcher a beef because it would spoil. I used
to shut my eyes and imagine the transformation that would be wrought in
these mountains by a colony of Swiss, who would turn the coves into
gardens, the moderate slopes into orchards, the steeper ones into
vineyards, by terracing, and who would export the finest of cheese made
from the surplus milk of their goats. But our native mountaineers--well,
a man who will not eat beef nor drink fresh cow's milk, and who despises
butter, cannot be interested in anything of the dairy order.

The chickens ran wild and scratched for a living; hence were thin,
tough, and poor layers. Eggs seldom were for sale. It was not of much
use to try to raise many chickens where they were unprotected from
hawks, minks, foxes, weasels and snakes.

Honey often was procured by spotting wild bees to their hoard and
chopping the tree, a mild form of sport in which most settlers are
expert. Our local preacher had a hundred hives of tame bees, producing
1,500 pounds of honey a year, for which he got ten cents a pound at the
railroad.

The mainstay of every farmer, aside from his cornfield, was his litter
of razorback hogs. "Old cornbread and sowbelly" are a menu complete for
the mountaineer. The wild pig, roaming foot-loose and free over hill and
dale, picks up his own living at all seasons and requires no attention
at all. He is the cheapest possible source of meat and yields the
quickest return: "no other food animal can increase his own weight a
hundred and fifty fold in the first eight months of his life." And so he
is regarded by his owner with the same affection that Connemara Paddy
bestows upon "the gintleman that pays the rint."

In physique and mentality, the razorback differs even more from a
domestic hog than a wild goose does from a tame one. Shaped in front
like a thin wedge, he can go through laurel thickets like a bear.
Armored with tough hide cushioned by bristles, he despises thorns,
brambles, and rattlesnakes, alike. His extravagantly long snout can
scen