129 
Perhaps this explains the wide girdle, or other bit of modern adornment, 
now seen sometimes on the quaint costumes. 
We were pushing through a deep forest in toiling over a ridge. Be- 
fore us were two children, walking in single file, a boy of fourteen and a 
girl a year younger. Our youthful guide pointed in their direction and 
remarked, “They were married last spring. Some of us do get married 
that early hereabouts; but we who have been to the settlement school 
don’t calculate to get married that soon.” 
“Store clothes” have displaced the homespun garments, the result 
being unfavorable in the appearance of the men. However, the settle- 
ment schools are reviving the home-weaving industry to some extent. The 
belt is beginning to rival the suspender on “Sunday” garments. 
The quaint old English language also is disappearing, though slowly. 
It is becoming crystallized and is losing its flexibility whereby it was wont 
to be bent this way or that, to suit the fancy or fit the occasion. In a 
reminiscence of his boyhood, Professor Dizney tells of a minister in 
Dizney’s valley, who, in preaching about apostasy, took as his text: ‘If 
they shall fall away”, and who concluded in a high key: “ ‘If they shall 
fall away’, means that they cannot fall away, for anybody who knows 
anything about the English laguage knows that it is a verb in the im- 
possible mood and everlasting tense.’ There also comes to mind the 
following expression: ‘‘Law me, Honey, I’m glad to be back from the 
plains. Wooded mountains make the restinest place to lay your eyes on.” 
There is about to pass away a most interesting folk-song based upon 
English and Scotch ballads, and preserved verbally in the mountains with 
slight modification, from generation to generation. These songs of 
romantic love, hate, sacrifice, and revenge are sung in almost all of the 
log cabins. Thereby the visitor, who may have thought that the moun- 
taineers neither weep nor smile, learns with delight that their natures 
are intensely fluid. The songs are sung in slow time, and in minor tones 
difficult to express in written music. An effort is being made to collect 
the words and write the music before it becomes too late. 
The open hospitality, once common, is shrinking. An old man in his 
watermelon patch put it thus: “I used to raise melons for the whole 
valley, so that the folks would come to sit and talk with me on the porch 
while we ate them. But now too many foreigners have come in; they 
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