A VANISHING ROMANCE 203 
not much hampered by the enforcement of the, to 
him, obnoxious law. As the country became more 
thickly settled, the struggle for existence harder, and 
the officers of the law more vigilant, whiskey-mak- 
ing became a special rather than a general occupa- 
tion, and was carried on by the boldest and most 
executive spirits of the region, who called their illicit 
product "blockade," thus attaching to themselves 
something of the respectability and even the hero- 
ism of a man running a blockade against an enemy 
in a just cause. Hence some of the most valuable 
men in the mountains have been moonshiners, as 
well, of course, as some of the least valuable. To-day 
the moonshiner is losing caste even among his own 
people,, and the younger generation of mountaineers 
finds its way out into the world when in need of 
employment for its energies. 
The people tell us that, in days gone by, the whis- 
key made in the mountains was pure, but since the 
more complete enforcement of the revenue laws, and 
the yet more limiting consequences of recently en- 
acted prohibition laws, the path of, the moonshiner 
has been so beset that he has resorted to various 
ways of increasing the value of his product, adding 
tobacco and other deleterious drugs to give it 
"bead" and make "seconds" look like proof whis- 
key. In short, he now makes "mean whiskey" that 
sometimes causes a curious form of madness in the 
drinker. 
The old time mountaineer, so far as moonshining 
was concerned, had often to choose between two 
