" 304
"THE STARBUCKS."
[From the Drama of the Same Name.]
CHAPTER I.
THE PEOPLE OF THE HILLS.
In every age of the world people who live close to nature have, by the
more cultivated, been classed as peculiar. An ignorant nation is brutal,
but an uneducated community in the midst of an enlightened nation is
quaint, unconsciously softened by the cultivation and refinement of
institutions that lie far away. In such communities live poets with
lyres attuned to drollery. Moved by the grandeurs of nature, the
sunrise, the sunset, the storm among the mountains, the tiller of the
gullied hill-side field is half dumb, but with those apt "few words
which are seldom spent in vain," he charicatures his own sense of
beauty, mingling rude metaphor with the language of "manage" to a horse.
I find that I am speaking of a certain community in Tennessee. And
perhaps no deductions drawn from a general view of civilization would
apply to these people. Some of their feuds, it is said, may be traced
back to the highlands of Scotland, and it is true that many of their
expressions seem to come from old books which they surely have never
read, but they do not eat oats, nor do they stand in sour awe of Sunday.
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