And the frontier met each and
all alike, with the same need and the same menace, and molded
them after one general pattern. If the cabin stood in a typical
Virginian settlement where the folk were of English stock, it may
be that the dulcimer and some old love song of the homeland
enlivened the work--or perhaps chairs were pushed back and young
people danced the country dances of the homeland and the Virginia
Reel, for these Virginian English were merry folk, and their
religion did not frown upon the dance. In a cabin on the
Shenandoah or the upper Yadkin the German tongue clicked away
over the evening dish of kraut or sounded more sedately in a
Lutheran hymn; while from some herder's but on the lower Yadkin
the wild note of the bagpipes or of the ancient four-stringed
harp mingled with the Gaelic speech.
Among the homes in the Shenandoah where old England's ways
prevailed, none was gayer than the tavern kept by the man whom
the good Moravian Brother called "Severe." There perhaps the
feasting celebrated the nuptials of John Sevier, who was barely
past his seventeenth birthday when he took to himself a wife. Or
perhaps the dancing, in moccasined feet on the puncheon flooring,
was a ceremonial to usher into Back Country life the new
municipality John had just organized, for John at nineteen had
taken his earliest step towards his larger career, which we shall
follow later on, as the architect of the first little governments
beyond the mountains.
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