Once when I was staying in a lumber camp on the Tennessee side, near the top of Smoky, my friend Bob and I tramped down to the nearest town, ten miles, for supplies. We did not start until after dinner and intended to spend the night at a hotel. It was a sultry day and we arrived very thirsty. Bob took some ice-water into his mouth, and instantly spat it out, exclaiming: "Be damned if I'll stay here; that ain't fit to drink; I'm goin' back." And back he would have gone, ten miles up a hard grade, at night, if someone had not shown us a spring.
A little colony of our Hazel Creek people took a notion to try the Georgia cotton mills. They nearly died there from homesickness, tight houses, and "bad water." All but one family returned as soon as they possibly could. While trying to save enough money to get away one old man said; "I lied to my God when I left the mountains and kem to these devilish cotton mills. Ef only He'd turn me into a varmint I'd run back to-night! Boys, I dream I'm in torment; an' when I wake up I lay thar an' think o' the spring branch runnin' over the root o' that thar poplar; an' I say, could I git me one drink o' that water I'd be content to lay me down and die!"
Poor old John! In his country there are a hundred spring branches running over poplar roots; but "_that thar_ poplar": we knew the very one he meant. It was by the roadside. The brooklet came from a disused still-house hidden in laurel and hemlock so dense that direct sunlight never penetrated the glen. Cold and sparkling and crystal clear, the gushing water enticed every wayfarer to bend and drink, whether he was thirsty or no. John is back in his own land now, and doubtless often goes to drink of that veritable fountain of youth.
Homespun jeans and linsey used to be the universal garb of the mountain people. Nowadays you will seldom find them, except in far-back places. Shoddy "store clothes" are cheaper and easier to get. And this is a sorry change, for the old-time material was sound and enduring, the direct product of hard personal toil, and so it was prized and taken care of; whereas such stuff as a backwoodsman can buy in his crossroads store is flimsy, soon loses shape and breaks down his own pride of personal appearance. Our average hillsman now goes about in a dirty blue shirt, wapsy and ragged trousers toggled up with a nail or two, thick socks sagging untidily over rusty brogans, and a huge, black, floppy hat that desecrates the landscape. Presently his hatband disappears, to be replaced with a groundhog thong, woven in and out of knife slits, like a shoestring.