ions are known in the mountains by the
expressive terms "pop-skull," "bust head," "bumblings" ("they make a
bumbly noise in a feller's head"). Some of them are so toxic that their
continued use might be fatal to the drinker. A few drams may turn a
normally good-hearted fellow into a raging fiend who will shoot or stab
without provocation.

As a rule, the mountain people have no compunctions about drinking,
their ideas on this, as on other matters of conduct, being those current
everywhere in the eighteenth century. Men, women and children drink
whiskey in family concert. I have seen undiluted spirits drunk, a
spoonful at a time, by a babe that was still at the breast, and she
never batted an eye (when I protested that raw whiskey would ruin the
infant's stomach, the mother replied, with widened eyes: "Why, if
there's liquor about, and she don't git none, _she jist raars_!"). In
spite of this, taking the mountain people by and large, they are an
abstemious race. In drinking, as in everything else, this is the Land of
Do Without. Comparatively few highlanders see liquor oftener than once
or twice a month. The lumberjacks and townspeople get most of the
output; for they can pay the price.

Blockade whiskey, until recently, sold to the consumer at from $2.50 to
$3.00 a gallon. The average yield is only two gallons to the bushel of
corn. Two and a half gallons is all that can be got out of a bushel by
blockaders' methods, even with the aid of a "thumpin'-chist," unless
lye be added. With corn selling at seventy-five cents to a dollar a
bushel, as it did in our settlement, and taking into account that the
average sales of a little moonshiner's still probably did not exceed a
gallon a day, and that a bootlegger must be rewarded liberally for
marketing the stuff, it will be seen that there was no fortune in this
mysterious trade, before prohibition raised the price. Let me give you a
picture in a few words.--

Here in the laurel-thicketed forest, miles from any wagon road, is a
little still, without so much as a roof over it. Hard by is a little
mill. There is not a sawed board in that mill--even the hopper is made
of clapboards riven on the spot.

Three or four men, haggard from sleepless vigils, strike out into
pathless forest through driving rain. Within five minutes the wet
underbrush has drenched them to the skin. They climb, climb, climb.
There is no trail for a long way; then they reach a faint one that
winds, winds