It is a slow and sleepy
tang that soothes the ear.
But the mountain curfew is the bark of a dog. Somewhere up on the range
a hound will call to another that all is well with him in his watch of
the night, and the family he guards are all abed. The aroused neighbor
calls to the dog at the cabin next to him, and the message that "all's
well" sweeps on the voices of the hounds on down the valley until it
ends in an echo in the crags.
V
The People of Pall Mall
They are a tranquil people who pass their days as do those who now live
in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf." They are free from
invidious jealousies and the blight of avarice toward each other, free
from doubt of the rectitude of their daughters and relieved from
solicitude that the future of their sons, if they remain in the valley,
will be influenced by dissipation or dishonesty--a people who find in
the changes of the weather and its effect upon crops their chief cause
for worry.
Through the gray dawn the farmer looks up to the skies for his weather
report for the day. As he works he watches the clouds scurrying across
the mountaintops, and when he notes they are banking against the unseen
summit of the Blue Mountains that rises to the east, he knows that rain
is soon to come. Some local unknown bard, watching those banking clouds,
has left a lyric to his people, and I heard a gray-bearded mountaineer
singing it as he predicted the break of a summer drought:
"The sun rose bright
But hid its head soon,
'Twill rain a-fore night
Ef hit don't rain a-fore noon.
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