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For a time they wandered through shadowy aisles between the tremendous trunks, breathing in sweet resinous odors, and then, soon after the first sunrays came slanting across a mountain shoulder, they came out upon a head of rock above the river. A hemlock had fallen athwart it, and they sat down where they could look out upon a majestic panorama of towering rock and snow.
This consists of four long poles three of bamboo and one of a resinous tree, anteng, set in a square and supporting, near the top, a platform of bamboo. A number of women have been invited to assist the family, and they now proceed to beat out sufficient rice to serve the guests. When the pounding is finished, a rice-mortar is set out in the open, and a little rice is placed in it.
Softly there fell, now and again, a needle from the Christmas-tree. A resinous, pine-tree odor filled the room. From the next house a clear, maiden's voice was singing the old, old Christmas carol, "A rose has bloomed From a tender root, Our fathers have sung: Out of Jesse it came."
Then away northward, through the deep, trestled swamps, leagues and leagues, across Bayou La Branche and Bayou Desair, and Pass Manchac and North Manchac, and Pontchatoula River two or three times; and out of the swamps and pine barrens into the sweet pine hills, with their great resinous boles rising one hundred two hundred feet overhead; over meadows and fields and many and many a beautiful clear creek, and ten or more times over the winding Tangipahoa, by narrow clearings, and the old tracks of forgotten hurricanes, and many a wide plantation; until more than two hundred miles from the great city, still northward across the sinking and swelling fields, the low, dark dome of another State's Capitol must rise amid spires and trees into the blue, and the green ruins of fortifications be passed, and the iron roads be found branching west, north, and east.
I remember one in particular which was universally practiced by the near kinsfolk. They would crop their hair very close, and then cover the head with a sort of hood or plaster of black pitch, the composition being clay, pulverized charcoal, and the resinous gum which exudes from the pine-tree.
Before leaving this subject, I may remark that just as in plants some glands secrete honey that attracts insects, others a resinous liquid that repels them, so the secretions of different genera of the homopterous division of the Hemiptera are curiously modified for strikingly different useful purposes.
I remarked many of our favourite garden shrubs among these wildings of nature: the fillagree, with its narrow, dark glossy-green leaves; the privet, with its modest white blossoms and purple berries; the lignum-vitae, with its strong resinous odour; the burnet-rose, and a great variety of elegant unknowns.
All the subtile strength of the hills ores and sweet waters and resinous perfumes and breath of healing leaf and root distilled to absolute purity in the clear ether that sweeps only from such bare, thunder-scoured summits made up the exhilarant draught in which they drank the mountain joy and received afar off its baptism of delight.
There was no furniture, save a single long dresser covered with coarse crockery, and a number of wooden benches and trestles, the legs of which sank deeply into the soft clay floor, while the only light, save that of the fire, was furnished by three torches stuck in sockets on the wall, which flickered and crackled, giving forth a strong resinous odor.
They took great pains in painting their bodies with all sorts of grotesque figures, the earthy coloring matter being laid on by means of oily or resinous substances extracted from plants or trees. These coats of paint, when fresh, served as holiday attire, and protected them from the bites of mosquitoes and other insects.
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