"To my mind the incident has Homeric elements.The Greeks would have looked at it in a large, legendary way.Here is Helen, strong and lithe of limb, ox-eyed, courageous, but woman-hearted and love-inspiring, contended for by all the braves and daring moonshiners of Cut Laurel Gap, pursued by the gallants of two States, the prize of a border warfare of bowie knives and revolvers.This Helen, magnanimous as attractive, is the witness of a pistol difficulty on her behalf, and when wanted by the areopagus, that she may neither implicate a lover nor punish an enemy (having nothing, this noble type of her sex) against nobody), skips away to Mount Ida, and there, under the aegis of the flag of her country, in a Licensed Distillery, stands with one slender foot in Tennessee and the other in North Carolina""Like the figure of the Republic itself, superior to state sovereignty," interposed the Friend.
"I beg your pardon," said the Professor, urging up Laura Matilda (for so he called the nervous mare, who fretted herself into a fever in the stony path), "I was quite able to get the woman out of that position without the aid of a metaphor.It is a large and Greek idea, that of standing in two mighty States, superior to the law, looking east and looking west, ready to transfer her agile body to either State on the approach of messengers of the court; and I'll be hanged if I didn't think that her nonchalant rumination of the weed, combined with her lofty moral attitude, added something to the picture."The Friend said that he was quite willing to join in the extremest defense of the privileges of beauty,--that he even held in abeyance judgment on the practice of dipping; but when it came to chewing, gum was as far as he could go as an allowance for the fair sex.
"When I consider everything that grows Holds in perfection but a little moment..."The rest of the stanza was lost, for the Professor was splashing through the stream.No sooner had we descended than the fording of streams began again.The Friend had been obliged to stipulate that the Professor should go ahead at these crossings, to keep the impetuous nag of the latter from throwing half the contents of the stream upon his slower and uncomplaining companion.
What a lovely country, but for the heat of noon and the long wearisomeness of the way!--not that the distance was great, but miles and miles more than expected.How charming the open glades of the river, how refreshing the great forests of oak and chestnut, and what a panorama of beauty the banks of rhododendrons, now intermingled with the lighter pink and white of the laurel! In this region the rhododendron is called laurel) and the laurel (the sheep-laurel of New England) is called ivy.
At Worth's, well on in the afternoon, we emerged into a wide, open farming intervale, a pleasant place of meadows and streams and decent dwellings.Worth's is the trading center of the region, has a post office and a saw-mill and a big country store; and the dwelling of the proprietor is not unlike a roomy New England country house.
Worth's has been immemorially a stopping-place in a region where places of accommodation are few.The proprietor, now an elderly man, whose reminiscences are long ante bellum, has seen the world grow up about him, he the honored, just center of it, and a family come up into the modern notions of life, with a boarding-school education and glimpses of city life and foreign travel.I fancy that nothing but tradition and a remaining Southern hospitality could induce this private family to suffer the incursions of this wayfaring man.Our travelers are not apt to be surprised at anything in American life, but they did not expect to find a house in this region with two pianos and a bevy of young ladies, whose clothes were certainly not made on Cut Laurel Gap, and to read in the books scattered about the house the evidences of the finishing schools with which our country is blessed, nor to find here pupils of the Stonewall Jackson Institute at Abingdon.With a flush of local pride, the Professor took up, in the roomy, pleasant chamber set apart for the guests, a copy of Porter's "Elements of Moral Science.""Where you see the 'Elements of Moral Science,'" the Friend generalized, "there'll be plenty of water and towels;" and the sign did not fail.The friends intended to read this book in the cool of the day; but as they sat on the long veranda, the voice of a maiden reading the latest novel to a sewing group behind the blinds in the drawing-room; and the antics of a mule and a boy in front of the store opposite; and the arrival of a spruce young man, who had just ridden over from somewhere, a matter of ten miles' gallop, to get a medicinal potion for his sick mother, and lingered chatting with the young ladies until we began to fear that his mother would recover before his return; the coming and going of lean women in shackly wagons to trade at the store; the coming home of the cows, splashing through the stream, hooking right and left, and lowing for the hand of the milker,--all these interruptions, together with the generally drowsy quiet of the approach of evening, interfered with the study of the Elements.And when the travelers, after a refreshing rest, went on their way next morning, considering the Elements and the pianos and the refinement, to say nothing of the cuisine, which is not treated of in the text-book referred to, they were content with a bill double that of brother Egger, in his brick magnificence.
The simple truth is, that the traveler in this region must be content to feed on natural beauties.And it is an unfortunate truth in natural history that the appetite for this sort of diet fails after a time, if the inner man is not supplied with other sort of food.
There is no landscape in the world that is agreeable after two days of rusty-bacon and slack biscuit.
"How lovely this would be," exclaimed the Professor, if it had a background of beefsteak and coffee!