A DAY'S DRIVE IN THREE STATES 9 



among the cases before him and his col- 

 leagues was one of alleged assault by " rock- 

 ing," that word being used in the legal 

 document, whatever its name, in which the 

 complaint was set forth. This point was of 

 special interest to me, I say. In my boy- 

 hood, which, so far as I know, was not ex- 

 ceptionally belligerent, it was an every-day 

 occurrence to "fire rocks" at an enemy, or 

 " rock him ; " whereas an editorial brother, 

 himself of New England birth, with whom 

 it is often my privilege to compare notes, 

 affirms that he never heard such expressions, 

 though he has sometimes met with them 

 and presumably corrected them in manu- 

 script stories. It was no small satisfaction 

 to find this bit of my own Massachusetts 

 Old Colony dialect still surviving, and in 

 common use, in the Carolinas. 



Walhalla itself, with an elevation of a 

 thousand feet, and mountains visible not far 

 off, lays some not unnatural claims to a 

 "climate," and in a small way is a health 

 resort, I believe, in spite of its rather sinis- 

 ter name, both summer and winter. To me, 

 indeed, it seemed a place to stop at rather 

 than to stay in ; but, as the reader knows, I 



