e months and twenty-four days"--the period, he
said, of a sow's gestation (in reality the average term is about three
months).

Most mountaineers are indulgent, super-indulgent parents. The oft-heard
threat "I'll w'ar ye out with a hick'ry!" is seldom carried out. The
boys, especially, grow up with little restraint beyond their own natural
sense of filial duty. Little children are allowed to eat and drink
anything they want--green fruit, adulterated candy, fresh cider, no
matter what--to the limit of repletion; and fatal consequences are not
rare. I have observed the very perversity of license allowed children,
similar to what Julian Ralph tells of a man on Bullskin Creek, who,
explaining why his child died, said that "No one couldn't make her take
no medicine; she just wouldn't take it; she was a Baker through and
through, and you never could make a Baker do nothin' he didn't want to!"

The saddest spectacle in the mountains is the tiny burial-ground,
without a headstone or headboard in it, all overgrown with weeds, and
perhaps unfenced, with cattle grazing over the low mounds or sunken
graves. The spot seems never to be visited between interments. I have
remarked elsewhere that most mountaineers are singularly callous in the
presence of serious injury or death. They show a no less remarkable lack
of reverence for the dead. Nothing on earth can be more poignantly
lonesome than one of these mountain burial-places, nothing so mutely
evident of neglect.

Funeral services are extremely simple. In the backwoods, where lumber is
scarce, a coffin will be knocked together from rough planks taken from
someone's loft, or out of puncheons hewn from the green trees. It is
slung on poles and carried like a litter. The only exercises at the
grave are singing and praying; and sometimes even those are omitted, as
in case no preacher can be summoned in time.

In all back settlements that I have visited, from Kentucky southward,
there is a strange custom as to the funeral sermon, that seems to have
no analogue elsewhere. It is not preached until long after the
interment, maybe a year or several years. In some districts the practice
is to hold joint services, at the same time and place, for all in the
neighborhood who died within the year. The time chosen will be after the
crops are gathered, so that everybody can attend. In other places a
husband's funeral sermon is postponed until his wife dies, or _vice
versa_, though the interval