ith
strangers, the women are wont to be shy, but speculative rather than
timid, as they glance betimes with "a slow, long look of mild inquiry,
or of general listlessness, or of unconscious and unaccountable
melancholy." Many, however, scrutinize a visitor calmly for minutes at a
time or frankly measure him with the gipsy eye of Carmen.

Outsiders, judging from the fruits of labor in more favored lands, have
charged the mountaineers with indolence. It is the wrong word. Shiftless
many of them are--afflicted with that malady which Barrie calls "acute
disinclination to work"--but that is not so much in their physical
nature as in their economic outlook. Rarely do we find mountaineers who
loaf all day on the floor or the doorstep like so many of the poor
whites of the lowlands. If not laboring, they at least must be doing
something, be it no more than walking ten miles to shoot a squirrel or
visit a crony.

As a class, they have great and restless physical energy. Considering
the quantity and quality of what they eat there is no people who can
beat them in endurance of strain and privation. They are great walkers
and carriers of burdens. Before there was a tub-mill in our settlement
one of my neighbors used to go, every other week, thirteen miles to
mill, carrying a two-bushel sack of corn (112 pounds) and returning with
his meal on the following day. This was done without any pack-strap but
simply shifting the load from one shoulder to the other, betimes.

One of our women, known as "Long Goody" (I measured her; six feet three
inches she stood) walked eighteen miles across the Smokies into
Tennessee, crossing at an elevation of 5,000 feet, merely to shop more
advantageously than she could at home. The next day she shouldered fifty
pounds of flour and some other groceries, and bore them home before
nightfall. Uncle Jimmy Crawford, in his seventy-second year came to
join a party of us on a bear hunt. He walked twelve miles across the
mountain, carrying his equipment and four days' rations for himself _and
dogs_. Finding that we had gone on ahead of him he followed to our camp
on Siler's Bald, twelve more miles, climbing another 3,000 feet, much of
it by bad trail, finished the twenty-four-mile trip in seven hours--and
then wanted to turn in and help cut the night-wood. Young mountaineers
afoot easily outstrip a horse on a day's journey by road and trail.

[Illustration: "At thirty a mountain woman is apt to have a worn