THE SPEECH OF THE MOUNTAINS 177 
One could go on indefinitely gathering together 
old words and phrases that bind us to the past. But 
there are other peculiarities of speech equally inter- 
esting which have been acquired and crystallized in 
the speech of the people during their sojourn in the 
New World, and one is delighted to meet a well- 
known proverb in the following guise, — "You kin 
carry a mule to the branch, but you can't make him 
drink." "Branch" means any stream of water 
smaller than a river, and when a stream or a road 
forks, the two divisions are "prongs." To be advised 
to take the right-hand prong of a road is amusing 
at first, but when you think of it, it is at least con- 
sistent. 
The mountaineer's rules of grammar are few but 
rigid. Whatever ends in 5 is plural, hence one finds 
such words as "molasses" preceded by a plural 
particle, but when the singular is used, as it some- 
times is, the grammatical plural termination is dis- 
carded and the word consistently and deliciously be- 
comes "molass." In course of time one gets used to 
" them molasses" and the assertion that " they make 
a good many molasses " ; as one also does to the word 
"several" applied to quantity. To be told that a 
man has raised, or, as he says, made, "several pota- 
toes," soon goes without notice, though it always 
comes with a pleasant kind of shock to be informed 
that he has "made several molasses." The moun- 
taineer, it may be said in passing, sells his molasses 
by the bushel. Since a noun ending in the sound of s 
is naturally regarded as plural, we have "fuse," to 
