upon that habit.

* * * * *

Afar off, counting by civilization, not by parallels of latitude, there
are mountains in this country of ours, east of the Mississippi, as
purple-black, wild, and pathless, some of them, as the peaks of the
Western sierras. These mountains are in the middle South. A few roads
climb from the plain below into their presence, and cautiously follow
the small rivers that act as guides--a few roads, no more. Here and
there are villages, or rather farm-centers, for the soil is fertile
wherever it is cleared; but the farms are old and stationary: they do
not grow, stretch out a fence here, or a new field there; they remain as
they were when the farmers' sons were armed and sent to swell George
Washington's little army. To this day the farmers' wives spin and weave,
and dye and fashion, with their own hands, each in her own house, the
garments worn by all the family; to this day they have seen nothing move
by steam. The locomotive waits beyond the peaks; the water-mill is the
highest idea of force. Half a mile from the village of Ellerby stands
one of these water-mills; to it come farmers and farmers' boys on
horseback, from miles around, with grist to be ground. And sometimes the
women come too, riding slowly on old, pacing cart-horses, their faces
hidden in the tubes of deep, long sun-bonnets, their arms moving up and
down, up and down, as the old horse stretches his head to his fore-feet
and back with every step. When two farm-women meet at the mill-block
there is much talking in the chipped-off mountain dialect; but they sit
on their horses without dismounting, strong, erect, and not uncomely,
with eyes like eagles', yet often toothless in their prime, in the
strange rural-American way, which makes one wonder what it was in the
life of the negro slaves which gives their grandchildren now such an
advantage in this over the descendants alike of the whites of
Massachusetts Bay and the plantations of the Carolinas. When the farmers
meet at the mill-block, they dismount and sit down in a row, not exactly
on their heels, but nearly so: in reality, they sit, or squat, on their
feet, nothing of them touching the ground save the soles of their heavy
shoes, the two tails of their blue homespun coats being brought round
and held in front. In this position they whittle and play with their
whips, or eat the giant apples of the mountains. Large, iron-framed men,
they talk but s