[1] “Do come” and “did come” are proper enough; why not “done come”? And in point of fact, this common Southern use of “done” with the past participle has its warrant in at least two lines of Chaucer: in The Knightes Tale (1055):—

“Hath Theseus doon wrought in noble wise,”

and in The Tale of the Man of Lawe (171):—

“Thise marchants han doon fraught her shippes newe.”

If a ship is “done loaded,” why may not a carriage have “done come”? Idiom is long-lived. As Lowell said of the Yankee vernacular, so doubtless may we say of the Carolinian, that it “often has antiquity and very respectable literary authority on its side.”

[2] If I seem to have said too much about the vulgar question of something to eat, let it be my apology that for a Northern traveler in the rural South the food question is nothing less than the health question. A few years ago, two Boston ornithologists, who had undertaken an extensive tour among the North Carolina mountains, returned before the time. Sickness had driven them home, it turned out; and when they came to publish the result of their investigations, they finished their narrative by saying, “Few Northern digestions could accomplish the feat of properly nourishing a man on native fare.” On my present trip, a resident physician assured me that the native mountaineers, living mostly out of doors and in one of the best of climates, are almost without exception dyspeptics.

[3] See especially an article by Mrs. Olive Thorne Miller in The Atlantic Monthly for June, 1896.

[4] All things go by comparison. “I always lived in the country till I came here,” said my driver to me one day.

[5] The great “war governor” and senator of North Carolina was born among the mountains of the State; and from what I heard, he seems to have left his name

“to be found, like a wild flower,
All over his dear country,”

as truly as Wallace ever did in Scotland.

[6] The case is recorded in The Auk, vol. vi. page 68.

[7] On a different road, and on a Sunday morning, I met a young colored woman,—an unusual sight, colored people being personæ non gratæ in the mountains. We bade each other good-morning, as Christians should. My notebook, I see, records her as dressed in her best clothes,—a blue gown, I think,—with a handsome light-colored silk parasol in one hand, and a tin pail in the other.

[8] The Auk, vol. iii. pp. 108 and 111.

[9] My first impression was correct. Mr. Brewster, as I now notice, says of the nest that it is “larger and composed of coarser material” than that of Junco hyemalis.

[10] “At Highlands I saw a single male,—an unusually brilliant one,—which I was told was the only bird of the kind in the vicinity.”

[11] According to a publication of the State Board of Agriculture, North Carolina contains forty-three peaks more than 6000 feet high, eighty-two others more than 5000 feet high, and an “innumerable” multitude the altitude of which is between 4000 and 5000 feet.

[12] Pulaski, or Pulaski City (the place goes by both names,—the second a reminiscence of its “booming” days, I should suppose), is so intermediate in size and appearance that I find myself speaking of it by turns as village, town, and city, with no thought of inconsistency or special inappropriateness.

[13] Mr. H. W. Henshaw once told me about a flock that appeared in winter in the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution, so exhausted that they could be picked off the trees like apples.