A DATS DRIVE IN THREE STATES 17 



The noon hour brought a sudden change 

 in the day's programme. All the forenoon 

 I had been asking questions, presuming upon 

 my double right as a traveler and a Yankee ; 

 now I was to take my turn in the witness- 

 box. My landlady's brother sat on the 

 veranda mending a fishing-tackle, and we 

 had hardly passed the time of day before it 

 became apparent that he possessed one of 

 nature's best intellectual gifts, an appetite 

 for knowledge. With admirable civility, 

 yet with no waste of time or breath, he went 

 about his work, and long before dinner was 

 announced I had given him my name, my 

 residence (my age, perhaps, but here recol- 

 lection becomes hazy), my occupation, the 



question of something to eat, let it be my apology that 

 for a Northern traveler in the rural South the food ques- 

 tion is nothing less than the health question. A few 

 years ago, two Boston ornithologists, who had undertaken 

 an extensive tour among the North Carolina mountains, 

 returned before the time. Sickness had driven them 

 home, it turned out ; and when they came to publish the 

 result of their investigations, they finished their narrative 

 by saying, ' ' Few Northern digestions could accomplish 

 the feat of properly nourishing a man on native fare." 

 On my present trip, a resident physician assured me that 

 the native mountaineers, living mostly out of doors and 

 in one of the best of climates, are almost without excep- 

 tion dyspeptics. 



