Their poteen (whiskey) craft, handed down by their Scotch-Irish ancestors, survives today in what outlanders term moonshining. Resentment against taxation of homemade whiskey survives too. The mountaineer reasons--I've heard them frequently in court--that the land is his, that he "heired it from his Pa, same as him from hisn," that he plants him some bread without no tax. Why can't he make whiskey from his corn without paying tax? As for killing in the Blue Ridge Country. In my profession of court stenographer I have reported many trials for killing and almost invariably my sympathy has been with the slayer. Usually he admits that he had it to do either for a real or fancied wrong, or for a slur to his womenfolks. I've never known of gangsters, fingermen, or paid killers in the Blue Ridge Country. With an inherent love of music, handed down from the wandering minstrels of Shakespeare's time, and with a wealth of ballads stored up in their heads and hearts, they found in these a joyful expression. Even the children, like their elders, can turn a hand to fashion a make-believe whistle of beech or maple, although they may never know that in so doing they are making an imitation of the Recorder upon which Queen Elizabeth herself was a skilled performer. Little Chad at the head of Raccoon Hollow will cut two corn stalks about the length of his small arms and earnestly proceed to make music by sawing one across the other, singing happily: Corn stalk fiddle and shoe-string bow, Best old fiddle in the country, oh! not knowing that Haydn, the child, likewise sawed one stick upon another in imitation of playing the fiddle. And there's Little Babe of Lonesome Creek who delights in a gourd banjo. His grandsir, finding a straight, long-necked gourd among those clustered on the vine over kitchen-house door, fashioned it into a banjo for the least one. Cut it flat on one side, did the old man, scooped out the seed, then covered the opening with a bit of brown paper made fast with flour paste, strung it with cat gut. And there, bless you, as fine a banjo as ever a body would want to pick. They are neighborly in the Blue Ridge Country. They ask no favor of any man. Yet the road is never too rough, the way too far, for one neighbor to go to the aid of another in time of sickness or death. I knew a little boy who was dangerously sick with a strange ailment that primitive home remedies could not heal. Neighbor boys made a slide, a quilt tied to two strong saplings, and carried their little friend some ten miles over a rough mountain footpath to the nearest wagon road. There, placing him in a jolt wagon, the bed of which had been filled with hay to ease his suffering in jolting over the rough creek-bed road, they continued the journey on for thirty miles to the wayside railroad station where the cars bore the afflicted child on to town and the hospital.