their social structure, the
Highlanders display an undying devotion to family and kindred.
Mountaineers everywhere are passionately attached to their homes. Tear
away from his native rock your Switzer, your Tyrolean, your Basque, your
Montenegrin, and all alike are stricken with homesickness beyond speech
or cure. At the first chance they will return, and thenceforth will
cling to their patrimonies, however poor these be.

So, too, our man of the Appalachians.--"I went down into the valley,
wunst, and I declar I nigh sultered! 'Pears like there ain't breath
enough to go round, with all them people. And the water don't do a body
no good; an' you cain't eat hearty, nor sleep good o' nights. Course
they pay big money down thar; but I'd a heap-sight ruther ketch me a big
old 'coon fer his hide. Boys, I did hone fer my dog Fiddler, an' the
times we'd have a-huntin', and the trout-fishin', an' the smell o' the
woods, and nobody bossin' and jowerin' at all. I'm a hill-billy, all
right, and they needn't to glory their old flat lands to me!"

Domestic affection is seldom expressed by the mountaineers--not even by
motherly or sisterly kisses--but it is very deep and real for all that.
In fact, the ties of kinship are stronger with them, and extend to
remoter degrees of consanguinity, than with any other Americans that I
know. Here again we see working the old feudal idea, an anachronism, but
often a beautiful one, in this bustling commercial age. Our hived and
promiscuous life in cities is breaking down the old fealty of kith and
kin. "God gives us our relatives," sighs the modern, "but, thank God, we
can choose our friends!" Such words would strike a mountaineer deep
with horror. Rather would he go the limit of Stevenson's Saint Ives:
"If it is a question of going to hell, go to hell like a gentleman, with
your ancestors!"

[Illustration: Photo by U. S. Forest Service

Whitewater Falls]

When the wilderness came to be settled by white men, courts were feeble
to puerility, and every man was a law unto himself. Many hard characters
came in with the pioneers--bad neighbors, arrogant, thievish, bold. As
society was not organized for mutual protection, it was inevitable that
cousin should look to cousin for help in time of trouble. So arose the
clan, the family league, and, as things change very slowly in the
mountains, we still have clan loyalty outside of and superior to the
law. "My family _right or wrong_!" is a slogan