a'r in yer teeth." Utensils
are limited to a frying-pan, an iron pot, a coffee-pot, a bucket, and
some gourds. There is not enough tableware to go around, and children
eat out of their parents' plates, or all "soup-in together" around one
bowl of stew or porridge.

Even to families that are fairly well-to-do there will come periods of
famine, such as Lincoln, speaking of his boyhood, called "pretty
pinching times." Hickory ashes then are used as a substitute for soda in
biscuits, and the empty salt-gourd will be soaked for brine to cook
with. Once, when I was boarding with a good family, our stores ran out
of everything, and none of our neighbors had the least to spare. We had
no meat of any kind for two weeks (the game had migrated) and no lard or
other grease for nearly a week. Then the meal and salt played out. One
day we were reduced to potatoes "straight," which were parboiled in
fresh water, and then burnt a little on the surface as substitute for
salt. Another day we had not a bite but string beans boiled in unsalted
water.

It is not uncommon in the far backwoods for a traveler, asking for a
match, to be told there is none in the house, nor even the pioneer's
flint and steel. Should the embers on the hearth go out, someone must
tramp to a neighbor's and fetch fire on a torch. Hence the saying: "Have
you come to borry fire, that you're in sich a hurry you can't chat?"

The shifts and expedients to which some of the mountain women are put,
from lack of utensils and vessels, are simply pathetic. John Fox tells
of a young preacher who stopped at a cabin in Georgia to pass the night.
"His hostess, as a mark of unusual distinction, killed a chicken, and
dressed it in a pan. She rinsed the pan and made up her dough in it. She
rinsed it again and went out and used it for a milk-pail. She came in,
rinsed it again, and went to the spring and brought it back full of
water. She filled up the glasses on the table, and gave him the pan with
the rest of the water in which to wash his hands. The woman was not a
slattern; it was the only utensil she had."

Such poverty is exceptional; yet it is an all but universal rule that
anything that cannot be cooked in a pot or fried in a pan must go
begging in the mountains. Once I helped my hostess to make kraut. We
chopped up a hundred pounds of cabbage with no cutter but a tin
coffee-can, holding this in the two hands and chopping downward with the
edge. Many times I stopped to ham