ion, he assumes that you have
had equal advantages. When you discuss with him any business of serious
concern, if you should go straight to the point, and open your mind
frankly, he would be nonplussed.

The fact is that our highlanders are a sly, suspicious, and secretive
folk. That, too, is a state of nature. Primitive society is by no means
a Utopia or a Garden of Eden. In wilderness life the feral arts of
concealment, spying, false "leads," and doubling on trails, are the arts
self-preservative. The native backwoodsman practices them as
instinctively and with as little compunction upon his own species as
upon the deer and the wolf from whom he learned them.

As a friend, no one will spring quicker to your aid, reckless of
consequences, and fight with you to the last ditch; but fear of betrayal
lies at the very bottom of his nature. His sleepless suspicion of
ulterior motives is no more, no less, than a feral trait, inherited from
a long line of forebears whose isolated lives were preserved only by
incessant vigilance against enemies that stalked by night and struck
without warning.

Casual visitors learn nothing about the true character of the
mountaineers. I am not speaking of personal but of race character--type.
No outsider can discern and measure those powerful but obscure motives,
those rooted prejudices, that constitute their real difference from
other men, until he has lived with the people a long time on terms of
intimacy. Nor can anyone be trusted to portray them if he holds a brief
either for or against this people. The fluttering tourist marks only the
oddities he sees, without knowing the reason for them. On the other
hand, a misguided champion flies to arms at first mention of an
unpleasant fact, and either denies it, clamoring for legal proof, or
tries to befog the whole subject and run it on the rocks of altercation.

The mountaineers are high-strung and sensitive to criticism. No one has
less use for "that worst scourge of avenging heaven, the candid friend."
Of late years they are growing conscious of their own belatedness, and
that touches a tender spot. "Hit don't take a big seed to hurt a sore
tooth." Since they do not see how anyone can find beauty or historic
interest in ways of life that the rest of the world has cast aside, so
they resent every exposure of their peculiarities as if that were
holding them up to ridicule or blame.

Strange to say, it provokes them to be called mountaineers