"John Marion, I want a shift o' shirts. Else, I got to go to bed to git this-un washed." The storekeeper laid out several of dark color: "Here's some you can wear without change till the shirt falls off." "That's right, John; gimme one thet won't advertise thet the ole woman's neglectin' me." Another was uncertain about the size of a pair of overalls for his boy: "Dunknow, John Marion! One tight enough to keep the bees out--a kid shore wastes energy when a bee gits in 'em." When it is "good dusk" the storekeeper closes the wooden shutters and fastens them by looping a small cotton string over a nail. All the mountaineers are on their way home, but they had not parted without an interchange of invitation: "Home with me, boys; home! Ef I can't feed ye well, I'll be friendly." Or, maybe, the invitation is not so sweeping, and holds a reservation: "Spend the night with me! I'll not stop you; I'll let you leave afore breakfast." Over any gathering at the store a pall of silence descends when a stranger rides up. If the newcomer is a new drummer unfamiliar with the ways of the mountains, if he comes imbued with the belief that the voice with the smile wins, and talkatively radiates his individual idea of fellowship and democracy, one by one his auditors silently drop away. To them, an insincere, a false note of democracy has been struck. Perhaps around the door there will linger some of the mountain boys waiting to satisfy their curiosity over the contents of the drummer's cases. John Marion Rains always listens to the story of prices, but his shelves are really replenished by the drummers who drive to the barn instead of the store, who unhitch their own horses and feed them from the storekeeper's supply of corn, who come into the center of the crowd only after they have unobtrusively lingered awhile in the fringe of it. One afternoon one of these mountaineers who had withdrawn to the porch, unhitched, without being solicited, a drummer's horse, and he had trouble in pulling off a loose shoe and renailing it. The drummer wanted to pay for the work, but the mountaineer shook his head. The deed had been done for the horse. The visitor insisted, and finally the price was fixed: "Bout a nickel!" A mountaineer seldom asks questions. Instead he makes a statement of that which appears to him to be the fact, and if unchallenged or uncorrected, it is accepted as the proper deduction. Early in my visit to Pall Mall I learned my lesson. "Have you lived all your life in the valley?" I asked an old mountaineer whom I met on the road as he was carrying on his shoulder a sack of corn to the mill. Into his eye there came a light of playfulness, then pity, quickly to be followed by a twinkle of fun. He simply could not let the opening pass. "Not yit," he said.