“I’m a mountain man and my forbears were mountain men. I know the feelings of folks raised in the mountains. I know they’re brave, and kind to friends and mean to foes. I know they’ve got sense and patience, and that they’ve got folly and madness in them too. These here quarrels, like the one that broke out a few minutes ago between these two young bantams—friends of mine, both of them, and good bantams—are a wicked waste. That’s what they are. They waste human lives and human happiness. They make enemies out of folks that had ought to be friends, and they leave little children orphans and make our people the laughing stock of the world. “For my part, I don’t wonder that the world laughs at them. I laugh at them too. They’re so behind the times—they’re so foolish—so like the wild animals out there in the mountain. They don’t seem to realize what it is to be men and to stand up fair and square, taking life and rejoicing, and letting other men take it and rejoice. They don’t seem to understand that hate is like a disease and that it causes rot at the heart and makes a man as disgusting as rotten fruit or a sick animal. They don’t understand it, because they’ve grown up in the blindness and sin of it. Why, I used to feel like that myself. I didn’t come of a quarreling family, and us Thompsons had no war of our own, but we took sides with them that had wars, and I’d have been as silly as the rest of you if I hadn’t been taught better by—” he hesitated and looked about him with a half-shy smile, drew his bow with thrilling resonance thrice across the deepest strings of his fiddle, and went on—“by my old fiddle here. Maybe you’ll understand and maybe you won’t. Music has laws. They are laws that run through everything that’s good and true—they run through the things you’re studying there in your books and they run through Nature too. They come from God and if we study them right they help us to know that we’re God’s children. “I’ve had to study it all out for myself, but I know what I know. And the grandest thing I know is that every man has an equal right to his life, to his liberty and to his learning. You may be friends and you may be foes, but life and liberty and learning are things that friend and foe have equal rights to—equal rights! Think of it awhile. Think of it as you walk up and down this here mountain side. Think of it when you go to bed at night. I’m an old man—an old mountain man—and you’re just as good as my kin, you-all are. And I tell you, it will be a shame to you what folks will spread over the whole countryside if you drive these two young ladies away when they’ve given up their ease and their friends for the whole summer long to come up here to learn you.” He ceased speaking, but his bow continued its magic movement back and forth across the strings. For a moment or two he played a curious melody with sharp, bright notes, like the sparks from a blazing pine. Then he spoke again.