energy when a bee gits in 'em."

When it is "good dusk" the storekeeper closes the wooden shutters and
fastens them by looping a small cotton string over a nail. All the
mountaineers are on their way home, but they had not parted without an
interchange of invitation:

"Home with me, boys; home! Ef I can't feed ye well, I'll be friendly."

Or, maybe, the invitation is not so sweeping, and holds a reservation:

"Spend the night with me! I'll not stop you; I'll let you leave afore
breakfast."

Over any gathering at the store a pall of silence descends when a
stranger rides up. If the newcomer is a new drummer unfamiliar with the
ways of the mountains, if he comes imbued with the belief that the voice
with the smile wins, and talkatively radiates his individual idea of
fellowship and democracy, one by one his auditors silently drop away. To
them, an insincere, a false note of democracy has been struck. Perhaps
around the door there will linger some of the mountain boys waiting to
satisfy their curiosity over the contents of the drummer's cases.

John Marion Rains always listens to the story of prices, but his shelves
are really replenished by the drummers who drive to the barn instead of
the store, who unhitch their own horses and feed them from the
storekeeper's supply of corn, who come into the center of the crowd only
after they have unobtrusively lingered awhile in the fringe of it.

One afternoon one of these mountaineers who had withdrawn to the porch,
unhitched, without being solicited, a drummer's horse, and he had
trouble in pulling off a loose shoe and renailing it. The drummer wanted
to pay for the work, but the mountaineer shook his head. The deed had
been done for the horse. The visitor insisted, and finally the price was
fixed:

"Bout a nickel!"

A mountaineer seldom asks questions. Instead he makes a statement of
that which appears to him to be the fact, and if unchallenged or
uncorrected, it is accepted as the proper deduction. Early in my visit
to Pall Mall I learned my lesson.

"Have you lived all your life in the valley?" I asked an old mountaineer
whom I met on the road as he was carrying on his shoulder a sack of corn
to the mill.

Into his eye there came a light of playfulness, then pity, quickly to be
followed by a twinkle of fun. He simply could not let the opening pass.

"Not yit," he said.

Later I saw a little fellow of six years of age chasing a chicken barren
of feathers over a y