e Philippines, had been
invalided home, and died there. Jack Coburn, in the kindness of his
heart, sent away and got a blank form of application to the Government
for funeral expenses, to which the family was entitled by law. He filled
it out, all but the signature, and rode away up to Stiles's to have the
old man sign it. But Stiles peremptorily refused to accept from the
nation what was due his dead son. "I ain't that hard pushed yit," was
his first and last word on the subject. This might seem to be the very
perversity of ignorance; but it was, in fact, renunciation on a point of
honor, and native pride refused to see the matter in any other light.

The mountaineer, born and bred to Spartan self-denial, has a scorn of
luxury, regarding its effeminacies with the same contempt as does the
nomadic Arab. And any assumption of superiority he will resent with blow
or sarcasm. A ragged hobbledehoy stood on the Vanderbilt grounds at
Biltmore, mouth open but silent, watching a gardener at work. The
latter, annoyed by the boy's vacuous stare, spoke up sharply: "What do
you want?" Like a flash the lad retorted: "Oh, dad sent me down hyur to
look at the place--said if I liked it, he mought buy it for me."

Once, as an experiment, I took a backwoodsman from the Smokies to
Knoxville, and put him up at a good hotel. Was he self-conscious,
bashful? Not a bit of it. When the waiter brought him a juicy
tenderloin, he snapped: "I don't eat my meat raw!" It was hard to find
anything on the long menu that he would eat. On the street he held his
head proudly erect, and regarded the crowd with an expression of "Tetch
me gin ye dar!" Although the surroundings were as strange to him as a
city of Mars would be to us, he showed neither concern nor approval,
but rather a fine disdain, like that of Diogenes at the country fair:
"Lord, how many things there be in this world of which Diogenes hath no
need!"

The poverty of the mountain people is naked, but high-minded and
unashamed. To comment on it, as I have done, is taken as an
impertinence. This is a fine trait, in its way, though rather hard on a
descriptive writer whose motives are ascribed to mere vulgarity and a
taste for scandal-mongering. The people, of course, have no ghost of an
idea that poverty may be more picturesque than luxury; and they are
quite as far from conceiving that a plain and friendly statement of
their actual condition, published to the world, is the surest way to
aw