and
faded look"]

In a climate where it showers about two days out of three through spring
and summer the women go about, like the men, unshielded from the wet. If
you expostulate, one will laugh and reply: "I ain't sugar, nor salt, nor
nobody's honey." Slickers are worn only on horseback--and two-thirds of
our people had no horses. A man who was so eccentric as to carry an
umbrella is known to this day as "Umbrell'" John Walker.

In winter, one sometimes may see adults and children going barefoot in
snow that is ankle deep. It used to be customary in our settlement to do
the morning chores barefooted in the snow. "Then," said one, "our feet
'd tingle and burn, so 't they wouldn't git a bit cold all day when we
put our shoes on." I knew a family whose children had no shoes all one
winter, and occasionally we had zero weather.

It seems to have been common, in earlier times, to go barefooted all the
year. Frederick Law Olmsted, a noted writer of the Civil War period, was
told by a squire of the Tennessee hills that "a majority of the folks
went barefoot all winter, though they had snow much of the time four or
five inches deep; and the man said he didn't think most of the men about
here had more than one coat, and they never wore one in winter except on
holidays. 'That was the healthiest way,' he reckoned, 'just to toughen
yourself and not wear no coat.' No matter how cold it was, he 'didn't
wear no coat.'" One of my own neighbors in the Smokies never owned a
coat until after his marriage, when a friend of mine gave him one.

It is the usual thing for men and boys to wade cold trout streams all
day, come in at sunset, disrobe to shirt and trousers, and then sit in
the piercing drafts of an open cabin drying out before the fire, though
the night be so cool that a stranger beside them shivers in his dry
flannels. After supper, the women, if they have been wearing shoes, will
remove them to ease their feet, no matter if it be freezing cold--and
the cracks in the floor may be an inch wide.

In bear hunting, our parties usually camped at about 5,000 feet above
sea level. At this elevation, in the long nights before Christmas, the
cold often was bitter and the wind might blow a gale. Sometimes the
native hunters would lie out in the open all night without a sign of a
blanket or an axe. They would say: "La! many's the night I've been out
when the frost was spewed up so high [measuring three or four inches
with the hand]