Over a
pair of buck antlers sometimes lay the long heavy home-made rifle
of the backwoodsman--sometimes even with a flintlock and called by
some pet feminine name. Once he saw the hominy block that the
mountaineers had borrowed from the Indians, and once a handmill
like the one from which the one woman was taken and the other left
in biblical days. He struck communities where the medium of
exchange was still barter, and he found mountaineers drinking
metheglin still as well as moonshine. Moreover, there were still
log-rollings, house-warmings, corn-shuckings, and quilting
parties, and sports were the same as in pioneer days--wrestling,
racing, jumping, and lifting barrels. Often he saw a cradle of
beegum, and old Judd had in his house a fox-horn made of hickory
bark which even June could blow. He ran across old-world
superstitions, too, and met one seventh son of a seventh son who
cured children of rash by blowing into their mouths. And he got
June to singing transatlantic songs, after old Judd said one day
that she knowed the "miserablest song he'd ever heerd"--meaning
the most sorrowful. And, thereupon, with quaint simplicity, June
put her heels on the rung of her chair, and with her elbows on her
knees, and her chin on both bent thumbs, sang him the oldest
version of "Barbara Allen" in a voice that startled Hale by its
power and sweetness.
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