80 
THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 
of either cane or other under-brush is called a "harricane," 
this originally meaning a place where a hurricane had once 
passed. ''Ghostes," *'postes," "waistes," etc., are common 
words. The expressions "met up with," ''I am a heap better," 
"Where's he at?" "much him up," — (Make much of him) are 
also often used. "Thers infi-delity an thers fi-delity, an the 
infi-dels they don't belive in the Bible, an the U-dels'' — but I 
failed to catch the last of the sentence in this bit of conversa- 
tion that I over-heard one day between two of these men. 
There is a sameness in names in that particular neighborhood, 
and the Jones' and Miller's are so numerous that to dis- 
tinguish the Bens and Bills of the same family name it is 
necessary to give them some prefix, hence they are known as 
Devil Bill Miller and Rum Tom Jones, etc. 
I had the courage to go to the home of the first named 
gentleman and found him, notwithstanding his name, a pleas- 
ant, bright-faced man. ' He, and his daughter, a beautiful, 
bare-footed girl, that Craddock might have used for a study, 
accompanied us to the cliff and the picturesque water-fall of 
seventy-five or more feet that they called the "Fall-over." 
When we had made the descent and stood under a high shelv- 
ing rock, the man was impressed with the grandeur of the 
place, and exclaimed, excitedly, while pointing to the rock 
above and the immense masses lying below, — "Don't you 
s'pose all this happened when Christ was crucified?" 
The old grandmother, who wore a red bandanna hand- 
kerchief over her head and sat smoking a pipe, asked me when 
I entered the house to "rest" my hat. The girls had bright 
and intelligent faces, but the woman, the mother of fourteen 
children, was dull and uninteresting. Among these people I 
found the men always brighter and more good-natured than 
the women ; because they see more of life, and perhaps, too, 
because they lead an outdoor life and see much of nature. One 
of these men, a superintendent of a Sunday-School, said — with 
