304 AROUND AN OLD HOMESTEAD. 



merit or has much of a flavor farther north than the 

 Central States or, at the outpost, Michigan,^ and is at 

 Its best in the fertile valleys along the Ohio. 



It is refreshing to find at least one literary man 

 who was a genuine worshiper at this wayside shrine. 

 After speaking of the wild muscadine grapes of the 

 South, the late Maurice Thompson remarks, in his 

 "By-Ways and Bird-Notes" (pp. 100, loi): 



"Next to the muscadine among wild fruit I rate the papaw 

 as best. It is genuinely wild, rich, racy, and, to me, palatable 

 and digestible. I once sent a box of papaws to a great Boston 

 author, whose friendship I chanced to possess, and was much 

 disappointed to learn that the musty odor of the fruit was very 

 distasteful to him. He fancied that the papaws were rotten ! 

 I dare say he never tasted them ; and if he had, their flavor 

 would have been too rank and savage for his endurance." 



Miss Murfree mentions the papaw in at least two 

 instances in her stories of the Great Smoky Mountains. 

 She places it with the laurel along the banks of the 

 Solacutta River, in "In the Clouds" (page 64) ; and it 

 was a pole trimmed there from a papaw-tree which 

 Mink Lorey used as a lever to raise the mill gate with. 

 In "The Despot of Broomsedge Cove," too (pages 9 

 and 12), she has a locust shrilling in a papaw-tree, 

 and It was against a papaw-tree that Eli Strove, the 

 constable, leaned as he sat upon a bowlder. These 

 are, of course, simply incidental touches of local color 



' The papaw, however, has for all time been immortalized in 

 being perpetuated as the name of the Paw Paw River, of Michigan, 

 and of some half-dozen municipalities called Pawpaw, in as many 

 different States, one of which, in Michigan, has reached the dignity of 

 becoming a county seat, with a population of nearly fifteen hundred 

 inhabitants. 



