124 THE FOGY J3AYS AND NOW; 



A RABUN COUNTY, GA., FROLIC. 



In the olden times, dancing was by odds the favorite amuse- 

 ment with the 3'^oung people, and in my youthful days I 

 engaged in all kinds of terpsichorean felicities, participated in 

 the fashionable cotillions, waltzes and polkas, at the balls, 

 weddings and parties, with the elite of that day ; have been 

 to the piney woods frolics, shin digs and stag dances, but in 

 Rabun County, Ga., where once lived our Chief Justice 

 Bleckley and the silver-tongued H. Y. M. Miller, I attended a 

 frolic, that for intensity of enjoyment, cast a glamour over all 

 the balance of my experience. 



I had recently returned from California, and ray father was a 

 contractor on the old Blue Ridge Railroad, in South Carolina, 

 and had taken a contract in Rabun County, Ga., known as 

 the Whitmire fill, and said by Col. Walter Gwmn, chief 

 engineer, to be the deepest railroad fill then known, measuring 

 108 feet from the culvert to the top of grade, and a descrip- 

 tion of which was given by our Judge George Hilly er in an 

 Athens paper, in his youthful reportorial work, and where I 

 first made his acquaintance. 



In this contract I was to be a partner as well as a manager 

 and had made a horse-back trip up into Rabun. I v/as riding 

 through the rich valley, at the very head-waters of the Ten- 

 nessee river, with a resident young man named Major Gibson. 

 Late in the afternoon (dusk had already commenced to throw 

 its sable mantle over the beautiful valley), as we j)assed a store 



