half dumb, but with those apt "few words
which are seldom spent in vain," he charicatures his own sense of
beauty, mingling rude metaphor with the language of "manage" to a horse.

I find that I am speaking of a certain community in Tennessee. And
perhaps no deductions drawn from a general view of civilization would
apply to these people. Some of their feuds, it is said, may be traced
back to the highlands of Scotland, and it is true that many of their
expressions seem to come from old books which they surely have never
read, but they do not eat oats, nor do they stand in sour awe of Sunday.
What religion they have is a pleasure to them. In the log meeting-house
they pray and sing, sometimes with a half-open eye on a fellow to be
"thrashed" on the following day for not having voted as he agreed;
"Amen" comes fervently from a corner made warm by the ardor of the
repentant sinner; "Hallelujah!" is shouted from the mourner's bench, and
a woman in nervous ecstasy pops her streaming hair; but the average man
has come to talk horse beneath the trees, and the young fellow with
sun-burnt down on his lip is there slily to hold the hand of a maid
frightened with happiness and boastingly to whisper shy words of love.

"Do you like Sam Bracken?" he inquires.

"Not much."

"If you like him much, I bet I can whup him. Like Steve Smith?"

"Not so powerful well."

"I can whup him."

"Bet you can't."

"You wait."

And the chances are that unless she modifies her statement the Smith boy
will be compelled to answer for the crime of her compliment.

In this community, in the edge of what is known as East Tennessee, the
memory of Andrew Jackson is held in deepest reverence. To those people
he was as a god-like hero of antiquity. Single-handed he defeated the
British at New Orleans. Nicholas Biddle, a great banker somewhere away
off yonder, had gathered all the money in the land, and it was Jackson
who compelled him to disgorge, thus not only establishing himself as the
master of war, but as the crusher of men who oppress the poor.

* * * * *

Prominent in the neighborhood of Smithfield, a town of three or four
hundred inhabitants, was Jasper Starbuck. Earlier in his life he had
whipped every man who stood in need of that kind of training. Usually
of a blythesome nature, he was subject to fits of melancholy, only to be
relieved by some sort of physical entanglement with an enemy. Then, his
"spel