, and that right around the fire, too." Cattle hunters in
the mountains never carry a blanket or a shelter-cloth, and they sleep
out wherever night finds them, often in pouring rain or flying snow. On
their arduous trips they find it burden enough to carry the salt for
their cattle, with a frying-pan, cup, corn pone, coffee, and
"sow-belly," all in a grain sack strapped to the man's back.

Such nurture, from childhood, makes white men as indifferent to the
elements as Fuegians. And it makes them anything but comfortable
companions for one who has been differently reared. During "court week"
when the hotels at the county-seat are overcrowded with countrymen, the
luckless drummers who happen to be there have continuous exercise in
closing doors. No mountaineer closes a door behind him. Winter or
summer, doors are to be shut only when folks go to bed. That is what
they are for. After close study of mountain speech I have failed to
discern that the word draft is understood, except in parts of the
Virginia and Kentucky mountains, where it means a brook. One is reminded
of the colonial, who, visiting England, remarked of the British people:
"It is a survival of the fittest--the fittest to exist in fog." Here, it
is the fittest to survive cold, and wet, and drafts.

Running barefooted in the snow is exceptional nowadays; but it is by no
means the limit of hardiness or callosity that some of these people
display. It is not so long ago that I passed an open lean-to of chestnut
bark far back in the wilderness, wherein a family of Tennesseans was
spending the year. There were three children, the eldest a lad of
twelve. The entire worldly possessions of this family could easily be
packed around on their backs. Poverty, however, does not account for
such manner of living. There is none so poor in the mountains that he
need rear his children in a bark shed. It is all a matter of taste.

There is a wealthy man known to everyone around Waynesville, who, being
asked where he resided, as a witness in court, answered: "Three, four
miles up and down Jonathan Creek." The judge was about to fine him for
contempt, when it developed that the witness spoke literal truth. He
lives neither in house nor camp, but perambulates his large estate and
when night comes lies down wherever he may happen to be. In winter he
has been known to go where some of his pigs bedded in the woods, usurp
the middle for himself, and borrow comfort from their bodily h