may be many years. These collective funeral
services last two or three days, and are attended by hundreds of people,
like a camp-meeting.

Strange scenes sometimes are witnessed at the graveside, prompted
perhaps by weird superstitions. At one of our burials, which was
attended by more than the usual retinue of kinsfolk, there were present
two mothers who bore each other the deadliest hate that women know. Each
had a child at her breast. When the clods fell, they silently exchanged
babies long enough for each to suckle her rival's child. Was it a
reconciliation cemented by the very life of their blood? Or was it a
charm to keep off evil spirits? No one could (or would) explain it to
me.

Weddings never are celebrated in church, but at the home of the bride,
and are jolly occasions, of course. Often the young men, stimulated with
more or less "moonshine," add the literally stunning compliment of a
shivaree.

The mountaineers have a native fondness for music and dancing, which,
with the shouting-spells of their revivals, are the only outlets for
those powerful emotions which otherwise they studiously conceal. The
harmony of "part singing" is unknown in the back districts, where men
and women both sing in a jerky treble. Most of their music is in the
weird, plaintive minor key that seems spontaneous with primitive people
throughout the world. Not only the tone, but the sentiment of their
hymns and ballads is usually of a melancholy nature, expressing the
wrath of God and the doom of sinners, or the luckless adventures of wild
blades and of maidens all forlorn. A Highlander might well say, with the
clown in _A Winter's Tale_, "I love a ballad but even too well; if it be
doleful matter, merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed, and
sung lamentably."

But where banjo and fiddle enter, the vapors vanish. Up strike The Fox
Chase, Shady Grove, Gamblin' man, Sourwood Mountain, and knees are
limbered, and merry voices rise.--

Call up your dog, O call up your dog!
Call up your dog!
Call up your dog!
Let 's a-go huntin' to ketch a groundhog.
Rang tang a-whaddle linky day!

Wherever the church has not put its ban on "twistifications" the country
dance is the chief amusement of young and old. I have never succeeded in
memorizing the queer "calls" at these dances, in proper order, and so
take the liberty of quoting from Mr. Haney's _Mountain People of
Kentucky_.--

"Eight hands up and go to