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Out in the darkness of the road he stood for a moment undecided whether or not he should go back to his lonely home, and some vague foreboding started him swiftly on down the creek. On top of a little hill he could see the light in his grandfather's house, and that far away he could hear the rollicking tune of "Sourwood Mountain."
In Deexie Land I take my stand, To live and die in Deexie." The aspen fluttered its yellow leaves in applause, and the sourwood threw at him by the breeze's hand a cluster of its scarlet foliage. The mouse-gray goldenrod nodded approval of his mood, and the oak-trees swung their yet green boughs in sympathy with his light-hearted onward rush.
The aspens fluttered into exquisite greenness. The sourwood put forth the satin of its tender leaves. All over the mountain-sides and through the forest thickets the oak-tips blushed faint pink, a delicate velvet against the stout bristles of the yellow pines.
Starting amid sycamores, elms, gums, willows, persimmons, chinquapins, he soon enters a region of beech, birch, basswood, magnolia, cucumber, butternut, holly, sourwood, box elder, ash, maple, buckeye, poplar, hemlock, and a great number of other growths along the creeks and branches. On the lower slopes are many species of oaks, with hickory, hemlock, pitch pine, locust, dogwood, chestnut.
And others he sang, too "The Merry Cuckoo" and "The Bailiff's Daughter". The last she liked so well that he sang it three times over, and they quite forgot the coffee. Racey Dawson was starting the second verse of "Sourwood Mountain" when someone without coughed apologetically. Racey stopped singing and looked toward the doorway.
A sled can be made quite easily by one man, out of wood growing on the spot, and with few iron fittings, or none at all. The runners are usually made of natural sourwood crooks, this timber being chosen because it wears very smooth and does not fur up nor splinter. The hinterland is naturally adapted to grazing, rather than to agriculture.
Long stretches of woods are on either side of the road now, with no sign of the changing season in the foliage save the slender, pointed, scarlet leaves and creamy plumes of the sourwood, gleaming here and there; and presently another panorama of open country unrolls to the view.
Nobody saw him but Melissa, who slipped quietly to the back of the room and drew near him. Softly and swiftly Chad's fingers worked and Melissa could scarcely hear the sound of the banjo under her father's loud voice, but she could make out that he was playing a tune that still vibrates unceasingly from the Pennsylvania border to the pine-covered hills of Georgia "Sourwood Mountain."
A Highlander might well say, with the clown in A Winter's Tale, "I love a ballad but even too well; if it be doleful matter, merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed, and sung lamentably." But where banjo and fiddle enter, the vapors vanish. Up strike The Fox Chase, Shady Grove, Gamblin' man, Sourwood Mountain, and knees are limbered, and merry voices rise.
She couldn't play "Sourwood Mountain" on the piano nor "Jinny git Aroun'," nor "Soapsuds over the Fence," but with a sudden inspiration she went back to an old hymn that they all knew, and at the end she won the tribute of an awed silence that made them file back to the beans on the porch.
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