The life of the Mountain Whites is not very unlike that of New England in the seventeenth century, New York in the eighteenth, and Minnesota in the nineteenth century. The people are self-sustaining in that they build their own houses, raise their own food, and make their own clothing. There have been instances where in the early morning a sheep was trotting about wearing a pelt which in the evening a mountaineer was wearing, it having been sheared, spun, woven, dyed, cut, made, and unfitted in that one day. Abraham Lincoln, as a boy in Indiana and a young man in Illinois, lived the same kind of life that these people are now going through; for here is the last refuge of the American frontier. These conditions seem not in themselves barbarous, for there are still thousands of Northern people who in childhood inhabited intelligent and well-to-do communities with good schools, in which most of the families still made their own soap and sugar, smoked their own hams, molded their own candles, and dyed their own cloth, where the great spinning-wheel still turned and the little wheel whirred. The Mountain Whites, however, are more than primitive or even colonial, they are early English; at least among them are still sung and handed down from grandmother to child Elizabethan ballads. Lord Thomas still hies him to his mother to know Whether I shall marry fair Elender, Or bring the brown girl home. Local bards also compose for themselves such stirring ditties as "Sourwood Mounting." Chickens a-crowin' in the sourwood mountain, Ho-de-ing-dang, diddle-lal-la-da. So many pretty girls I can't count 'em, Ho-de-ing-dang, diddle-lal-la-da. My true love lives up in the head of a holler, She won't come and I won't call 'er. My true love, she's a black-eyed daisy, If I don't get her, I'll go crazy.