sich, some sorry fellers come
in thar full o' moonshine an' shot their revolvers. I'm a-tellin' ye hit
takes a moughty resol_ute_ gal."

The great need of our mountaineers to-day is trained leaders of their
own. The future of Appalachia lies mostly in the hands of those resolute
native boys and girls who win the education fitting them for such
leadership. Here is where the nation at large is summoned by a solemn
duty. And it should act quickly, because commercialism exploits and
debauches quickly. But the schools needed here are not ordinary graded
schools. They should be vocational schools that will turn out good
farmers, good mechanics, good housewives. Meantime let a model farm be
established in every mountain county showing how to get the most out of
mountain land. Such object lessons would speedily work an economic
revolution. It is an economic problem, fundamentally, that the
mountaineer has to face.

THE END

Footnotes:

[1] A friend of mine on the U. S. Geological Survey tested with his
clinometer a mountain cornfield that sloped at an angle of fifty
degrees.

[2] Average annual rainfall of New York City, 44 inches; of Glencoe, in
the Scotch Highlands, nearly 130 inches.

[3] _Gant-lot_: a fenced enclosure into which cattle are driven after
cutting them out from those of other owners. So called because the
mountain cattle run wild, feeding only on grass and browse, and "they
couldn't travel well to market when filled up on green stuff: so they're
penned up to git _gant_ and nimble."

[4] Pure bluff of mine, at that time; but it was good policy to assume
perfect confidence.

[5] This was in 1904. There are no dispensaries in North Carolina now.

[6] It is a curious fact that most horses despise the stuff. A
celebrated revenue officer told me that for several years he rode a
horse which was in the habit of drinking a mouthful from every stream
that he forded; but if there was the least taint of still-slop in the
water, he would whisk his nose about and refuse to drink. The officer
then had only to follow up the stream, and he would infallibly find a
still.

[7] Ellwood Wilson, Sr., in the _Sewanee Review_.

[8] In mountain dialect such words as settlement, government, studyment
(reverie) are accented on the last syllable, or drawled with equal
stress throughout.

[9] So also in the lowland South. An extraordinary affectation of
propriety appeared in a dispatch to the _Atlanta Constitution_