w no humor at
all in such a possibility--but when the door closed, I could hear those
girls stifling shrieks of laughter.

Literally, that night, I was a member of the family. I had a bed to
myself (the following night I was not so fortunate)--in one corner;
behind the head of mine the old woman, the daughter-in-law and the
baby had another in the other corner, and the old man with the two boys
spread a pallet on the floor. That is the invariable rule of courtesy
with the mountaineer, to give his bed to the stranger and take to
the floor himself, and, in passing, let me say that never, in a
long experience, have I seen the slightest consciousness--much less
immodesty--in a mountain cabin in my life. The same attitude on the
part of the visitors is taken for granted--any other indeed holds mortal
possibilities of offence--so that if the visitor has common sense, all
embarrassment passes at once. The door was closed, the fire blazed on
uncovered, the smothered talk and laughter of the two girls ceased, the
coon-hunter came not and the night passed in peace.

It must have been near daybreak that I was aroused by the old man
leaving the cabin and I heard voices and the sound of horses' feet
outside. When he came back he was grinning.

"Hit's your mules."

"Who found them?"

"The Wild Dog had 'em," he said.

III. THE AURICULAR TALENT OF THE HON. SAMUEL BUDD

Behind us came the Hon. Samuel Budd. Just when the sun was slitting the
east with a long streak of fire, the Hon. Samuel was, with the jocund
day, standing tiptoe in his stirrups on the misty mountain top and
peering into the ravine down which we had slid the night before, and he
grumbled no little when he saw that he, too, must get off his horse
and slide down. The Hon. Samuel was ambitious, Southern, and a lawyer.
Without saying, it goes that he was also a politician. He was not a
native of the mountains, but he had cast his fortunes in the highlands,
and he was taking the first step that he hoped would, before many
years, land him in the National Capitol. He really knew little about the
mountaineers, even now, and he had never been among his constituents on
Devil's Fork, where he was bound now. The campaign had so far been full
of humor and full of trials--not the least of which sprang from the fact
that it was sorghum time. Everybody through the mountains was making
sorghum, and every mountain child was eating molasses.

Now, as the world knows, the s