To the outside world the most interesting char- acter in the mountains is the moonshiner, who appears to the imagination as the Robin Hood of the Southern greenwood, sallying forth from his illicit "still," hidden in some cavern in the mountains, to pursue the relentless vendetta and contribute "spirits" to a grateful community.

Who is this romantic figure? When and how did he come upon the scene? Unfortunately for romance, he is not a survival of some ancient age and custom, but on the contrary, a product of conditions resulting from the Civil War. " Before the war" the mountaineer converted his grain into whiskey just as the New Englander converted his apples into cider. The act of distilling in itself was not a crime, and became so only because it was an evasion of the revenue laws. In these late years the wave of prohibition passing over the South has further complicated the act and made it reprehensible in the eyes of most people. But we have only to contemplate the immense quantity of distilling in Kentucky, Illinois, and other great places of production to see that it is not a question of morals but simply of money. In the mountains, where it is stigmatized not as illegal but as " illicit," a nice distinction, it is not a question of morals but of rights.

Formerly, when no odium was attached to it, the distillation of whiskey was universal and respectable, according to the customs of the time, and, in spite of the supply of whiskey kept in every house, the people were not intemperate. Even to-day, the word "whiskey" has no such sinister meaning in the mountains as it has acquired in the outer world, where its use has been so long abused in the cities, although its distillation, because of its secrecy, its hidden ways, its "illicit" character, has made it the most destructive to character of any one pursuit.

At the beginning of the Civil War for the sake of revenue a very heavy tax was placed upon all distilled alcoholic liquors. After the war was over, the tax was not removed, and this is the grievance of the mountaineer, who says the tax should have been removed, that it is unjust and oppressive, and he has a right to do as he pleases with his own corn, and to evade a law that interferes with his personal freedom. We read in the stories of English life much about the right of smuggling, the practice of smuggling being not only right but heroic, and it was doubtless in accordance with this sentiment, which may have been strengthened by his desire to taste the forbidden fruit, that the mountaineer continued as of old to make his own whiskey, omitting the costly formula of obtaining a government license and thereafter subjecting himself to government supervision. At first, because of his remoteness, he was not much hampered by the enforcement of the, to him, obnoxious law. As the country became more thickly settled, the struggle for existence harder, and the officers of the law more vigilant, whiskey-making became a special rather than a general occupation, and was carried on by the boldest and most executive spirits of the region, who called their illicit product "blockade," thus attaching to themselves something of the respectability and even the heroism of a man running a blockade against an enemy in a just cause. Hence some of the most valuable men in the mountains have been moonshiners, as well, of course, as some of the least valuable. To-day the moonshiner is losing caste even among his own people,, and the younger generation of mountaineers finds its way out into the world when in need of employment for its energies.

The people tell us that, in days gone by, the whiskey made in the mountains was pure, but since the more complete enforcement of the revenue laws, and the yet more limiting consequences of recently enacted prohibition laws, the path of the moonshiner has been so beset that he has resorted to various ways of increasing the value of his product, adding tobacco and other deleterious drugs to give it "bead" and make "seconds" look like proof whiskey. In short, he now makes "mean whiskey" that sometimes causes a curious form of madness in the drinker.

The old time mountaineer, so far as moonshining was concerned, had often to choose between two evils. His possession consisted perhaps of a large family and a small cornfield, the latter often on a mountain slope so steep that its staying there seemed little short of miraculous. His corn being his wealth, it had to buy the clothes of the family if they had any. He could with great labor "tote" it down the mountain many miles to the nearest market, get next to nothing for it, go home to his needy family, an "honest man" in the eyes of the law, but despised by his neighbors as being "no account" in the warfare of life. Or he could betake himself to some lonely gorge not far from home, "still up" his grain, easily transport the product and yet more easily dispose of it. There is always a market for corn in this form, and the price it brings is several hundred fold that of the raw material, and the man who "stilled," though a reprobate in the eye of the law, until very recently was not so in the estimation of his neighbors. His family was fed and clothed, he waxed rich, and the stranger who came to the mountains admired his picturesque home and praised him for his industry, unaware of the true nature of his labors. It must have been a nice matter for any judge, taking into consideration all the circumstances, to decide whether the moonshiner of yesterday, when no avenues to livelihood were open, was a "good" man or a "bad" one. The unsuccessful moonshiner, of course, was bad.

Within the past few years the moonshiner, along with many time-honored customs, has been rapidly vanishing. But before that one often met him in the woods, patrolling some lonely path, gun on shoulder. If you asked him what he was doing he looked at you with kind and guileless eyes and told you he was "lookin' for squirrels," and as soon as you had passed he discharged his rifle, not into your quivering body, but into the air to inform his confederates that somebody was coming. He wore no mark of Cain upon his brow, often he was a handsome fellow, clever and fearless. You might know him for months, even buy eggs or mustard greens of him or his offspring, without suspecting the truth.

The moonshiner required gifts of a high order to succeed in his precarious calling. If caught distilling, there was a heavy fine and a term in prison, and whoever pleased could get ready money for betraying his hiding-place, a severe strain on the loyalty of impecunious or unfriendly neighbors. He owned a piece of land and raised corn on it, but not corn enough. He was always buying meal or carrying corn to the mill to be ground. Sometimes he took a little to several mills, but that deceived no one. Everybody knew he got a bag of meal at Scrugg's mill on Monday, another at the Pumpkin Patch mill on Tuesday, and a third at the Bear Wallow on Thursday, and everybody knew what he did with it, though if you asked him you would be gravely informed that he "fed hawgs."

He was honest, always leaving full measure in the bottle he found behind a stump. The method of exchange was simple: You put your bottle in company with money behind a stump in the woods; then you told the first mountain man you met what you had done. Even though he might have no interest in the business, by some system of communication the news was conveyed to the right place, and when you went next day you found your bottle full. Of course you kept away from the bottle's hiding-place meantime. The system did not work under observation.

It is not impossible, even in these days, to get samples of exhilarating "corn juice," a colorless liquid with a peculiar, flower-like aroma that deceives the stranger. It seems, for the first second after it is taken into the mouth, as inoffensive as the water it looks like, with a delicate flavor of wild flowers. But wait another second, and you will think you have performed the juggler's feat of eating fire, but without knowing how. In time it might ripen, but it never has time. It is the only thing in the South that cannot wait. It is enough to strangle a crocodile, and yet the trained native finds it too mild to suit his palate and sometimes adds the juice of the buckeye to give it zest. If you have ever tasted buckeye juice, you will understand that it is able to impart zest.

When his still was discovered, the moonshiner sometimes argued the case quickly and to the point with his gun, but generally he hid away. It was only from the "revenuers" or "raiders" that he hid, however. In the case of a "spy," as he termed those overzealous neighbors of his who for the sake of the reward paid for such services informed the revenue officers where to find his still, he seldom spared the bullet, and it was as apt to come from behind as anywhere else, such "varmint" not being considered worth a fair fight. The life of an informer, if he was discovered, was worth considerably less than the sum he got for informing. Sooner or later he came to grief. Of course the law made an effort to apprehend the transgressor in such cases, but the forest is vast, and the quest was about as hopeless as hunting for a very small needle in a very large haystack. The woods tell no tales, nor do good people very much regret the untimely end of the "informer," for usually his kind is more detrimental to a community than is an honest outlaw.

The moonshiner defended his still as other men do their hearths. When two moonshiners fell out, they got their deepest revenge by betraying each other's still. This was generally followed by the shooting of one by the other, when vengeance was sure to descend upon the slayer, the avenger in his turn being shot by a member of the first victim's family. Thus was sometimes started a blood feud that lasted for generations, or until the death of the last male on one side. These deeds sound wild, but they were not of common occurrence, and all shooting was strictly confined to quarrels among themselves. A stranger might go into the home of a man red-handed with the blood of his foe and be received so cordially that he would never suspect his frank host of being "wanted" in the criminal court. Such lawless deeds, although they sometimes occurred, were not frequent in the North Carolina mountains, nor were they gilded by romance outside the story-books they gilded by romance outside the story-books and newspapers. Those frightful blood feuds that have given such notoriety to certain districts in Kentucky and Virginia, and which were sometimes though not always connected with moonshining, are unknown here.

That the day of the moonshiner is passing is well illustrated by the fact that when the road was surveyed up Tryon Mountain a few years ago, not less than half a dozen moonshine stills were routed on the little streams adorning that dignified eminence, while to-day there is probably not a single still on the mountain. Only the remains of the stills were found, of course, for by the time the surveyors got there the watchful owners had taken away the copper retorts and whatever else was valuable.

Six little stills gone off Tryon Mountain at that time undoubtedly meant six little stills set up elsewhere in the mountains near, for not unless the retort was found and destroyed, and he too poor to buy another, did the owner of a still abandon his occupation. To the young and active mountaineer there was for long an irresistible fascination about moonshining. In it he found combined, as it were, the excitements of war with the reward of industry. It was his Wall Street with a spice of personal danger thrown in. When he was caught and put in jail he was terribly ashamed, not of being in jail, but of getting caught. It was something of a shock when one first came to the mountains to have a woman tell you her husband was in jail as frankly and with as little consciousness of disgrace as she might tell you that he had gone to visit his relatives. To go to jail for moonshining was almost as good as being a martyr. When a man came out, his friends laughed and shook hands with him, and he went back to "stilling" with a grim determination not to get caught again. What happened to the stills on Tryon Mountain is fast happening everywhere; as roads and settlements come in, the "moonshine still" goes out.

Although the moonshiner existed everywhere in the mountains, his most noted retreat was in the Dark Corners, on the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge. Where is this mysterious and dangerous region? Nobody seems to know exactly, though in a general way it is over towards Hogback, across the South Carolina state line. In course of time one discovers the name to be generic. There are " Dark Corners" on the maps in various states of the South, but they are not related to each other, nor to us excepting through a common reputation for lawlessness. If nature had planned our Dark Corners on purpose for the successful distillation of iniquitous "corn-juice," she could not have planned better, made up as it is of valleys guarded by mountain walls, furnished with rushing streams, and with numerous obscure exits in different directions. Best of all, perhaps, it lies directly on the State line, for when the skein of the moonshiner's life becomes tangled by spies and revenuers, he needs another state handy to step into for rest and reflection, and whence he can in safety give spirituous consolation to his brethren.

The principal water-course of our Dark Corners is Vaughn's Creek, whose source is supposed to be in that lovely gap between Hogback and Rocky Spur, into which, as seen from Traumfest, the sun drops and disappears at the winter solstice, and whose upper waters were once believed to be bristling with stills. Of course no outsider was supposed to go into the Dark Corners, but any one might follow that road winding along high up on Melrose Mountain to a certain point, where looking down he could see directly into the forbidden region. With what breathless curiosity you peer down there the first time! And what do you see? Did you not know it to be in the Dark Corners, you might suppose it to be a corner in some paradise. In the distance, on a mound and surrounded by tall trees, stands a large, old-fashioned house. Below it are cultivated fields covering the bottom of a little valley through which winds a stream, one of the numerous tributaries of Vaughn's Creek. Almost beneath you is a cabin with a tall tree shading it, the green fields beyond it merging into those others. The term "dark," it is evident, cannot refer to nature, for sunshine floods the place, its woods we are sure are fragrant, and its streams murmur with sweet voices, and there is not the slightest sign of wickedness anywhere - which is a little disappointing. This of course is only one very small portion of the Dark Corners, the rest being hidden behind wooded ridges. And this valley, with its sparkling waters and high surrounding mountains, is so tempting in its possibilities that one longs for the means, including the ability of the landscape artist, to convert it into the dream of beauty it could so easily become.

But though we may look so safely down into one end of the Dark Corners, hold our breath up there on Melrose Mountain, and see nothing to hold it for, access to that charmed region is even to-day as difficult to the stranger as it has always been believed to be undesirable. There is a road in, but it appears to have been designed to keep people out. By far the easiest way to get there is to walk. And this we did many a time in by-gone days, having first made friends with the principal offenders against the excise law. It was the people of the Dark Corners who muddled our hitherto clear convictions about right and wrong. The young girls who came out of there to bring us flowers smiled as sweetly as any child of fortune. And one has seen the face of a moonshiner glow with an expression that assured one that, whatever the verdict of the world, he would not be counted bad in that final court where human prejudices are ruled out.

That the Dark Corners got its name from the flourishing but questionable industry carried on there is disputed by some, who say that the name was given, not because of moral obliquity, but because once a stump orator, trying to rouse the people at some political crisis, told them they were steeped in ignorance, that they lived in dark corners, and never came out into the light. "Dark Corners!' The name struck the fancy of deriding neighbors and stuck. However that may be, Dark Corners here came to be synonymous with the haunt of the moonshiner, whose boldest deeds were executed there in days gone by. Many tales are told of raids into the Dark Corners, of tragedies enacted there, and finally of the clever manner in which the "master moonshiner" conducted to a happy issue his perilous vocation, rendered ever more perilous by the encroachments of civilization. This kindly outlaw did not shoot the invaders; he invited them to dinner, cared for their horses, entertained them with his best, no doubt including an accidental bottle, then followed them to his still, looked on while they destroyed his expensive outfit, assisted them in loading the barrels of confiscated "stuff," even politely lending them his own wagon and horses to convey it away. It was difficult to get "stuff" hauled out of the Dark Corners, because nobody would do it. No negro driver could be induced to go in there at any price, so it was a real kindness to be helped out by the moonshiner himself.

Such conduct as this could not fail of its reward. The "raider," so it is said, did his duty to the extent of satisfying the demands of his office, and if he suspected that the stuff confiscated was but a part, and a small part, of what remained "hid out" in the ravines, he did not overwork his conscience nor risk his popularity trying to find it. Neither did he accuse the man, who had treated him so handsomely, of owning the still found so near his house. This was a coincidence which did not concern him. Neither did he come too often nor too secretly. It was whispered that it was not to the interest of the revenuer to destroy so good an excuse for his own office.

Of course a good deal depended upon the quality of the " revenuer " assigned to a district, but even that could be arranged, it not being unheard of for the brother or other near relative of a notorious moonshiner to be elected to that discreet office. There are a good many ways to evade an unpopular law in a country where the majority is "agin the government." Even the licensed stills have been known to be operated most successfully by clever moonshiners who knew how to satisfy the demands of the inspector and at the same time manipulate the machinery in a way to make licensed distilling pay as well as that not licensed.

It would be hasty to affirm that "blockade" is no longer made in the mountains, but it is not now made in the free-and-easy manner and on the comparatively large scale of former years, although as a matter of fact the amount of whiskey manufactured in the little mountain stills has never been worth the cost of trying to restrain it.

In these days those rows of demijohn-shaped jugs in which Traumfest used to transport her "vinegar" are no more seen standing on the platform of the railway station. It is astonishing the amount of vinegar that used to go out of Traumfest, in jugs. It had a powerful alcoholic smell, this vinegar, but those who handled it turned the olfactory equivalent of a deaf ear to this peculiarity, and having received it as vinegar, unquestioningly passed it on as such. It went to other stations, where it was received by those in waiting, and by them distributed to such as needed this sort of vinegar to their salad. Sometimes it was "molasses" jugs that had this peculiar smell, which was no odor of sanctity, nor yet of honest sorghum.

To visit a moonshine still was the natural desire of all good people, and this could easily be done after the confidence of the owner had been gained, for he then trusted you completely. It is psychologically an interesting experience. The forest seems full of eyes as you follow your guide through the lonely paths. You have a feeling that somebody is looking at you and reading the truth in your guilty heart. For the moment you, too, are an outlaw, and the mingled feelings that assail you are not wholly disagreeable. One's feelings undergo a curious change, however, upon finding the still, not in a cave on a wild mountain-side, nor in some all but inaccessible glen, but in a little ravine near the moonshiner's home, where live his wife and little children, those beautiful little children so common in this country. One notices the delicate framework of both parents, the small hands and feet characteristic of the people of the South, the well-formed features, the unfulfilled promise of a nature designed for a life of refinement.

The man leads you to his still as naturally as he would take you to see his corn-mill. You are astonished to find how near the still is to the house, until you reflect how far away the house itself is. The object of your quest is perhaps so hidden in the ravine that you do not suspect its presence until you are standing directly over it, and then would not know but for a faint line of smoke coming up through the tree-tops. The path to it is very obscure: you might have thought it a rabbit-path; and yet the still has been here undisturbed for ten years. To maintain a still without a path is part of the business. Following the steep trail to the bottom of the ravine, you soon find yourself at the still, which consists of a low roof covering a little furnace made of stones. In one end of the furnace is cemented the copper retort, a picturesque object suggesting wizards and alchemists. The pipe connects the retort with the "worm" that lies coiled in a keg of running water, and from which through a tube is escaping in a slender stream the precious liquor that resembles water in looks but not in taste. A vat or two of "beer," or fermenting meal, giving forth a sour, yeasty smell, a few jugs and kegs waiting to be filled-such is the moonshiner's still. The fire is made of rails or poles, one end burning in the furnace. To feed the fire, it is only necessary to push up the fuel as the ends burn off. It is better not to chop wood in the neighborhood of a still, lest chips betray the workman.

A visit to the moonshine still, no matter how often one may go, never ceases to be exciting. It may be the spice of danger attached to it that makes the fire glow with so red and sinister an eye in the rude furnace, and light up so dramatically the human figures in the wild glen closely curtained with laurel and rhododendron leaves. Sometimes the inside of the still is almost as dark as night, because of no windows and the close-pressing foliage, when one's feelings are heightened in proportion.

Notwithstanding the abundance of "moonshine" one seldom sees drunkenness in the mountains, though one would do well, so it is said, to avoid certain regions of a Saturday night, for then the lovers of strong waters betake themselves to secret places in the woods, where bottles change hands and young men on the way home sing out of tune.

It is not long since, walking along the roads of a Saturday afternoon, one would see a fresh-cut laurel bush lying in the path or in the middle of the road. If you followed the direction in which it pointed, you would find another one at the first intersecting path, either pointing up the path or away from it. You might not notice these bushes, but there were those who would. Every mountaineer, seeing a fresh-cut laurel bush in the road of a Saturday " evening," - it is evening here of ter midday, knew it to be what the gypsies call a patteran, and that to follow the direction in which it pointed would lead him finally to some well-hidden spot where a man with a jug was waiting for customers. The patteran would guide any one to the appointed place, but unless you were a regular customer or known to be going with honest intentions you would not find any one when you got there. You might notice, however, a man sauntering along the path ahead of you, loudly whistling.

Yes, the moonshiner seems almost to have vanished from many parts of the North Carolina mountains, with whatever of romance the story-books have attached to him. The people who still demand strong waters may know how to get them, but one no longer sees the Patteran of Saturday evenings, nor those rows of odd-smelling molasses jugs on the platform of the railway station, fearlessly awaiting the coming of the train.