om a year of unspeakably
monotonous toil. And for the young folks, it is their theater, their
circus, their county fair. (I say this with no disrespect: "big-meetin'
time" is a gala week, if there be any such thing at all in the
mountains--its attractiveness is full as much secular as spiritual to
the great body of the people.)

It is a camp by day only, or up to closing time. No mountaineer owns a
tent. Preachers and exhorters are housed nearby, and visitors from all
the country scatter about with their friends, or sleep in the open,
cooking their meals by the wayside.

In these backwoods revival meetings we can witness to-day the weird
phenomena of ungovernable shouting, ecstasy, bodily contortions, trance,
catalepsy, and other results of hypnotic suggestion and the contagious
one-mindedness of an overwrought crowd. This is called "taking a big
through," and is regarded as the madness of supernatural joy. It is a
mild form of that extraordinary frenzy which swept the Kentucky
settlements in 1800, when thousands of men and women at the
camp-meetings fell victims to "the jerks," "barking exercises," erotic
vagaries, physical wreckage, or insanity, to which the frenzy led.

Many mountaineers are easily carried away by new doctrines extravagantly
presented. Religious mania is taken for inspiration by the superstitious
who are looking for "signs and wonders." At one time Mormon prophets
lured women from the backwoods of western Carolina and eastern
Tennessee. Later there was a similar exodus of people to the
Castellites, a sect of whom it was commonly remarked that "everybody who
joins the Castellites goes crazy." In our day the same may be said of
the Holy Rollers and Holiness People.

In a feud town of eastern Kentucky, not long ago, I saw two Holiness
exhorters prancing before a solemnly attentive crowd in the court-house
square, one of them shouting and exhibiting the "holy laugh," while the
other pointed to the Cumberland River and cried, "I don't say _if_ I had
the faith, I say I _have_ the faith, to walk over that river dry-shod!"
I scanned the crowd, and saw nothing but belief, or willingness to
believe, on any countenance. Of course, most mountaineers are more
intelligent than that; but few of them are free from superstitions of
one kind or other. There are to-day many believers in witchcraft among
them (though none own it to any but their intimates) and nearly
everybody in the hills has faith in portents.