valley of the Yadkin, whose terraces are adorned by the picturesque homes of planters formerly owning hundreds of slaves. Whether, in order to be picturesque, one may be trim, or not, one must leave an open question, but it is true that things are not altogether "shipshape" in the Land of Nod; and the prevailing lack of trimness is not to be attributed wholly to the disturbances of the late civil war, since even in the best of the old times, to which regretful reference is sometimes made, the tendency of the population was not progressive. The people cling to the customs of their Scotch, English, and French ancestors, and while a refreshing minority give evidence of having been born in the morning, the majority seem to have preferred the post-prandial season, as would certainly be natural in the Land of Nod.
City-bred Yankees might be surprised at the many old-fashioned ways common in this section of the country, and once practiced in New Hampshire. Imagine water, for the use of a large household, brought from springs in pump-logs, or on the head of some lithe, straight negro, and nobody seeming to regard such an arrangement as inconvenient. Dishes must be washed on the table, and the water therefrom flung wherever the flinger listeth. Fortunately the houses are usually well drained in the natural and safe way of setting the buildings on high land, which is easily done, since there are so many gentle slopes whose feet give fields excellent for cultivation, and whose summits afford sites for dwellings. Nodites first, however, hunt a spring of good water; then they proceed to erect the many buildings necessary to comfortable southern life, in the neighborhood of the spring. The Nodding housekeepers do not buy enticing and ornamental little boxes of what purports to be ground spice, et cetera; they buy, for instance, peppercorns, and somebody, must grind them in a ponderous iron mortar with a correspondingly heavy pestle; many other articles, which innocent Yankees are prone to purchase at the grocer's, are quite disdained by the ladies of Nod who will not tolerate adulteration in their ample store-rooms.
Kerosene is believed by many Nodites to be an invention of the devil, so old-fashioned lamps, filled with oil or lard, assist candles in placidly making darkness visible, while in the families of quality their great silver candlesticks of ancestral value give nearly as much radiance to a supper-table as do the lights which they support. I regret to say that many an old piece of silver went to help support "our army."
Negro servants are necessarily hired to a large extent, but many good house-servants have been evolved, so to speak, from the class known as poor whites. The evolution has been accomplished through the patient care of the mistresses, who are almost without exception gentlewomen and sincere Christians. Indeed it would be hard to find a community where earnest faith in some creed is so much the rule as in the country of which we speak.
Of the blacks not in service many have fallen into the idle and improvident ways natural to the race. Perhaps one out of fifty keeps his cabin tolerably free from leaks, his rail or brush fences up, and his cattle in fair working condition, while his wife and children assist him to cultivate the land which he has hired from his old master, and which he hopes to buy sometime. Of those who have attempted a course of study their teachers agree in saying that up to a certain point they are promising scholars; but, beyond that stage progress seems barred to them, save in occasional instances. Undoubtedly the negro does as well as would the white man who had emerged from the same condition with the same precession of circumstances.
There is a class in the Land of Nod somewhat like the farmers of the north living far from railroads. Absence of northern school system has caused, I think, in a measure, a lack in this
