330 THE CAROLINA MOUNTAINS 
ing," and who never failed to offer you a cupful of 
the boiling syrup. And following the pleasant fra- 
grance of wintergreen, we found the "birch still" 
hidden in the woods, though not for reasons of se- 
crecy, as no penalty is attached to the distillation of 
the essential oils that are, at the country stores, 
exchanged for shoes and sugar. 
One's youthful conception of birch bark, that it 
was something that grew out in the woods to be 
chewed, is here enlarged by discovering the birch 
still, wherever the sweet birch abounds, zealously 
extracting the fragrant oil that goes to flavor our 
candies and perfume our medicines under the name 
of "wintergreen." Another youthful belief, gathered 
from literature that oil floats, is also modified by the 
discovery that birch oil at least could never be cast 
upon the troubled waters, because it is red and 
heavy, and sinks to the bottom of the bottle of water 
into which it runs from the " worm " in the still. The 
only objection one has to the birch still is the 
pathetic bare trunks left standing in the forest where 
the bark has been completely cut from the trees. 
This objection does not attach to the delightful 
pennyroyal still that one sometimes finds near the 
dry banks, where pennyroyal grows in intoxicating 
abundance, and the gathering of which seems to 
leave no scar nor in any way diminish the supply. 
Pennyroyal oil floats, as oil ought, on the surface of 
the water into which it drops, and the pennyroyal 
still has so thoroughly scented the halls of memory 
that one can never again smell the aromatic herb in 
