Wilkins Versus the Mosquito
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells the story of the Suncook Valley's worst mosquito summer, when the swarms came off the flooded marsh and he swore the bites made his mash ferment faster. He covers the old 'fever and ague' cures, the 1862 revenue stamps on patent bitters, and what heat really does to a ferment, and coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells new stories about copper screens, a mosquito sealed in a seam, and a log water-pipe built to keep the condenser cold. Wilkins also plays a voicemail from Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and knocks down the old belief that whiskey in the blood keeps mosquitoes away.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
♦ A high, thin whine of a mosquito close to the horn, then a hard slap
Wilkins: Got you, you little bastard. Barnaby! Barnaby, quit rolling in that millrace mud and settle yourself down. I know they're biting you. They're biting me too, and you don't see me wallowing in the ditch like a Barnstead Democrat after a cattle show. Settle, I said! There. There's a good bear.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across planks, settles
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then fading under
Wilkins: Good evening, ladies, gentlemen, deacons, drunkards, and any revenue man with his ear to the stovepipe. You're listening to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcast from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I am Dr. George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, coin-stamper, keeper of the largest and worst-tempered bear in Merrimack County, and tonight a veteran of the bloodiest war this valley ever saw. I don't mean the late rebellion. I mean the summer I went to war with the mosquito.
♦ Mosquito whine, slap
Wilkins: And as you can hear, the enemy has not signed the surrender. First, a quick word from the man who keeps the lamp oil burning.
Announcer: Friends! One quick word! The Flame-Flow Still, protected under U.S. Patent 10,561,960 and hand-built of heavy-gauge pure copper, is waiting for you. Visit moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com, and see what honest copper looks like!
♪ Short fiddle sting
Fever, Ague, And The Bottle
Wilkins: Now, before I tell you how the skeeters near carried off my whole operation, you ought to know why every man in this country has a mosquito story and a bottle to go with it. All my life I've heard the old folks talk of the fever and ague. The shakes. You burn like a forge one day and rattle like a loose wagon wheel the next, teeth chattering so hard I've had patients crack their own molars and come to me for the remains. Out west on the prairie it's the plague of every settler. But we had it here too, down in the river lowlands of New England, along the Connecticut and in the wet bottomlands where the mills dam up the water.
Wilkins: And what causes it? Ask a Concord physician with a gold watch chain and he'll tell you it's miasma. Bad air off the swamp at evening. The Italians call it mal aria, bad air, and our learned men nod along. Now, I am only a tooth-puller with soot in my beard, but I'll tell you what I've noticed. Every time I've stood in that bad air at evening, I was not bitten by the air. I was bitten by something with six legs and a needle for a nose. I won't claim I can prove it. But if the Concord doctors ever spent one August night in the Suncook marsh instead of a feather bed, they might change their tune.
Wilkins: The cure for the ague is quinine, ground from the bark of a South American tree they call cinchona. Bitter as a widow's opinion of her husband's brother. During the war the blockade squeezed quinine out of the South so hard that ladies sewed it into their petticoats and smugglers stuffed it into the hollow heads of china dolls. Imagine a Union picket patting down a little girl's dolly and finding enough quinine in its skull to cure a regiment. Hell of a way to fight a war.
Wilkins: And where there's a fever, there's a Yankee selling a bottle for it. Ayer's Ague Cure out of Lowell, Massachusetts. Hostetter's Stomach Bitters, which the boys in blue drank by the case and swore was medicine. I have tasted Hostetter's, and I'll tell you it cures the ague the same way a mule kick cures a headache: you forget the first complaint entirely. Many a good temperance lady in a dry town took her bitters three times a day for her nerves and sang louder in church than the organ.
Wilkins: But here's what most folks don't know. When Mr. Lincoln's revenue law of 1862 came down, it didn't only tax the whiskey. It put stamp taxes on patent medicines too. Every bottle of bitters, every box of liver pills, every jar of Dr. So-and-So's Miracle Liniment had to wear a federal revenue stamp like a cow wears a brand. So even the temperance lady sipping her nerve tonic was paying Mr. Lincoln's war one spoonful at a time. Mr. Lincoln stamped my bitters, stamped my whiskey, and he'd have stamped my mosquito bites too if he could have found a clerk willing to count them.
♦ Mosquito whine, slap, Wilkins grunts
Wilkins: There's another one. That's six tonight, Barnaby, and I've got the blood on my palm to prove it.
♪ Banjo bridge
The Summer Of The Skeeter, And Our Guest
Wilkins: So, the summer itself. The spring before, the Suncook came up out of its banks like a drunk out of a Saturday-night pew. Flooded the low meadows behind the mills, filled every hollow, every cellar hole, every old potash kettle and rain barrel from here to Barnstead Parade. Then the water went down and left a thousand little standing ponds, warm as dishwater. And come July, the hottest one I can remember, every one of those puddles hatched an army.
Wilkins: They came off that marsh at sundown in a gray cloud. You could hear them before you saw them, a whine like a thousand fiddlers tuning up at once and none of them sober. They got in your ears, up your nose, into your shirt collar, down your trousers. If you went out to the privy after dark you came back with welts in places a decent man doesn't show his doctor, and I am that doctor, so I saw all of them. Half of Pittsfield walked bowlegged that summer, and it wasn't from riding.
Wilkins: Now, here's a thing I learned. Only the female skeeter bites. The males sip flower juice and sing. I've known a few marriages in Barnstead that ran on the same principle. And she wants blood for her eggs, so she'll go through a wool stocking to get it.
Wilkins: Now to the mash. I had six barrels of corn and rye working in the still-house that July, and I swear on my grandmother's dentures, those barrels drew skeeters like a church supper draws Baptists. They hovered over the barrel heads in clouds you could have cut with a hay knife. And then the mash started working faster than I'd ever seen. Foaming, rolling, burping like a fat alderman after Thanksgiving. A ferment that ought to take five days ran in three. So I developed a theory, and I'll give it to you straight. The skeeters bit me all day. My blood that summer was so thick with rye that they went home and beat their wives. Then, drunk on Wilkins, they flew into the mash barrels to sober up, drowned by the thousand, and every bite they'd taken out of me went into that mash and set it boiling. The bites fermented the mash. I told that to anyone who'd stand still for it.
Wilkins: Now, was that the truth? Wait for segment three and I'll tell you what really happened, because I don't let a good lie stand in front of a good lesson for long.
Wilkins: But the best part of that summer was Deputy Ezekiel Pound. Not the deputy from the river chase. A fresh one, out from Concord, who'd heard about Fort Wilkins and figured to make his name. He got it in his head that if he lay up in the marsh behind the still-house for three nights, he'd catch me running a batch and have his evidence. Three nights in the Suncook marsh in that July. I knew he was there the first evening, because I could hear him slapping himself like a man applauding his own funeral.
Wilkins: By the second night the slapping had turned to swearing, and I learned three new words I've since taught to Barnaby. By the third morning he came staggering up out of the cattails onto my dooryard, and friends, I've pulled the teeth of men kicked by horses who looked better. His eyelids had swelled shut till he looked like a sleeping pig. His ears had swelled up like two Baldwin apples left out in a hailstorm. He'd scratched his neck and wrists till they ran red, and the blackflies had found the scratches and were holding a camp meeting in them. He could only see me by tipping his head back and squinting under one puffed-up lid, like a man reading a high shelf.
Wilkins: He says, 'Wilkins, I need a doctor.' And I say, 'You've come to one, Deputy, though my specialty is the mouth, and you've been bitten everywhere but.' So I set him on my dental stool, took out my gum lancet, and opened the worst of the welts on his neck to let out the poison, which came out yellow and stinking. He squealed like a shoat at the cider press. I cleaned him with a rag soaked in good strong spirit, and he squealed again. Then I made the mistake of letting him walk past the still-house window to the turnpike.
♦ Bear grunt, chain rattles hard
Wilkins: Barnaby had been smelling blood on that deputy all morning. He lunged to the end of his chain and caught Deputy Pound by the hind end, and I heard the sound of good Concord broadcloth giving way, a long rrrrrip like a bedsheet torn for bandages. Barnaby sat back on his haunches holding the whole seat of that man's breeches in his jaws and chewing it thoughtfully, like a deacon weighing a sermon. And Deputy Pound went down Route 28 toward Epsom with his welts on the front and his bare white backside waving to the whole town on the back. That was the first time a Merrimack County lawman ever showed his true face going away from me. And he never filed a word, because how would that warrant read? 'Evidence: none. Breeches: half.'
Wilkins: Now, I've been taken in by the sheriff twice in my life and paid for it with a shrug and a grin. But no sheriff ever got as much blood out of me as the skeeters did that July. And no man worked harder to keep them out of my still-house than the man sitting across the table from me tonight. He hammers the copper at the Fort Wilkins foundry, and he's got burns on his forearms older than some of my deputies. Welcome to the horn, Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening, folks. And I'll say up front, I don't care to hear that story about the bites fermenting the mash again. I was there. I know what fermented the mash.
Wilkins: Hold your tongue till segment three, you'll spoil my reputation as a liar. Now, Silas, that July. Tell the people what you did about the barrels.
Silas: Well, the barrels were in a bad way. The Doctor had cheesecloth tied over the heads, but cheesecloth gets wet and sags, and the skeeters and the little red-eyed vinegar flies went straight through the gaps. We lost one whole barrel. Turned sour as a schoolmarm. Smelled like a pickle crock left in the sun. So I went down to the shop and drew some fine copper wire through my plate, the thinnest I could pull without it snapping, and wove it into a screen, tight as a cobweb. It took me the better part of four nights. Then I hammered a copper hoop around each screen so it sat snug over the barrel head and the vent.
Wilkins: And did it work?
Silas: Not one more barrel soured. The skeeters would land on that screen at dusk and walk around it like a cat on a hot stove, trying to find a way in. They couldn't. The gas from the mash came up through the wire and they went mad for it, but there wasn't a hole big enough for a mosquito's ambition.
Wilkins: I'll tell you, Silas made those screens prettier than the wire cloth on the Pittsfield mill windows. I've seen men try that trick with iron window screen and get a rust streak in their mash.
Silas: Iron's no good near a ferment. It rusts, it stains, it puts a taste in. Copper holds up. That's why it's copper or nothing in my shop.
Wilkins: Now tell them about your little friend in the snuffbox.
Silas: Oh, Lord. All right. That same summer the Doctor had a swan neck weeping at a seam, right where it bends down toward the worm. I took it down to the forge to re-braze it. Hot day, shop doors open, and the skeeters were thick as smoke. I ran my spelter, the brass, along the seam, and it flowed nice and bright, and I thought no more of it. A good while after, we had to cut that section out to fit a new piece, and when I split the old seam with a cold chisel, there inside the brass, sealed up whole, was a mosquito. Legs, wings, beak and all, like a fly in amber. She must've lit on the seam just as the metal ran, and I brazed her right in.
Wilkins: Tell them what you call her.
Silas: I call her the only revenue collector who ever paid her own way. She came to take her cut and ended up part of the still. I keep her in a tin snuffbox on the shelf over my anvil.
Wilkins: She's the only creature in Merrimack County that ever got inside a copper still and couldn't get out with a bribe. And I'll add, Silas brazes cleaner than any man in this valley. You won't catch him using lead solder on a still, because lead in the drink rots a man's teeth, his gut, and his wits, and I've pulled the black teeth to prove it.
Silas: Never. Not on anything that touches the vapor.
Wilkins: Now Ned. Tell them about Ned.
Silas: Ned was my apprentice that summer. A good boy, strong as an ox and about as quick. Our worm tub needed fresh cold water every run, and the closest water was down by the Berry Pond shore, so I'd send Ned with two buckets on a yoke, usually at dusk when the work was done. Now, dusk at Berry Pond that July was like walking into a hornet's nest with your shirt off. One evening Ned came back with both buckets full and his face so swollen I didn't know him. His eyes had closed up to slits, his lips looked like two sausages, and the backs of his hands were one big welt. He'd been slapping so hard he'd spilled half the water on the way, so he went back for more. That's Ned. Loyal as a dog and twice as dumb.
Wilkins: I lanced that boy too. I was lancing half the town that summer.
Silas: So I decided nobody was going to Berry Pond at dusk again. There's a cold spring up on the Catamount slope that runs all summer, cold enough to make your teeth ache. I bored out spruce logs with an auger, the way the old-timers made aqueducts, end to end down the hill, and where the logs met I hammered copper sleeves around the joints and clamped them so they wouldn't leak. It ran the whole way down to the still-house worm tub.
Wilkins: And that spring water ran colder than any pond water, which turned out to matter a hell of a lot. I'll get to that.
Silas: Ned cried when I showed him. Not from the bites. He was just glad.
Wilkins: And the smudge pot. Tell them about the smudge pot, because it's the only time I've ever seen my bear act like a Christian.
Silas: There was an old copper kettle in the scrap pile with a crack in the bottom. I couldn't trust it for liquid, so I punched air holes around the sides, set it on three iron legs, and filled it with punkwood and green fern. It doesn't burn so much as sulk. Thick white smoke, and the skeeters can't abide it. I set it out by the still-house window in the evenings to keep them off the barrels.
Wilkins: And Barnaby?
Silas: Barnaby figured it out the second night. He dragged his chain over and sat himself right in the smoke, every evening at sundown, eyes half shut, head nodding. Like a deacon in his pew.
Wilkins: And he smells about as holy. That bear came out of July smoked like a ham. I'd catch the dogs of Pittsfield following him with their tongues out. Silas, stay right there, I want you for the copper talk. But first the bills have to be paid, and here's the man with the brass voice.
♪ Brisk banjo vamp
Ad Break
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♪ Fiddle flourish, out
Copper And The Craft, Or What Really Fermented The Mash
Wilkins: All right, Silas. Go ahead and spoil my lie.
Silas: It was the heat, Doctor.
Wilkins: It was the heat. Friends, I have to confess before God, Barnaby, and the Merrimack County bar: the bites didn't ferment my mash. The heat did. Yeast is a lazy little beast in cold weather and a holy terror in warm. In a cool cellar in October a mash might work a week. In that July the still-house was hot as the hinges of Hades, and the yeast ate through the sugar like Barnstead boys through a church picnic. That's why it ran in three days.
Wilkins: And as for the skeeters swarming the barrels: you smell the gas off a working mash. Lean over a barrel and it'll knock you back, sharp in the nose. Now, I've noticed the skeeters go for a man's breath and his warm skin. They hover around your mouth when you're talking, which is why I've swallowed more of them than any man alive. A working mash breathes out that same sort of gas, all day and all night, more than a whole congregation. So the skeeters thought my barrels were the biggest, juiciest Christians in New Hampshire, and came in droves to bite them. That's the truth of it. And by the by, that gas will smother a man in a closed room, so keep the still-house open to the air.
Wilkins: But listen close, because there's a danger in that heat. Too hot is as bad as too cold. When the barrel gets past what I'd call blood-warm, up in the nineties, the yeast gets sick and cranky. It starts making those heavy, oily, headache-making spirits the old men call fusel oil, and sometimes it just quits halfway, and you're left with a sweet, sour, sticky mess. I lost part of a barrel that way, the one by the south wall where the sun beat on the logs. So, step by step, this is how you keep a summer mash in hand:
Wilkins: One. Set your barrels in the coolest corner, the north side, on the dirt floor or a stone, never against a sun-baked wall.
Wilkins: Two. Cover every barrel head. Cloth at the least, a tight copper screen if you've got a Silas. The little red-eyed flies carry the vinegar mother on their feet, and one fly can turn forty gallons of good mash into salad dressing. There's a Frenchman named Pasteur who's been studying how vinegar comes about, and I'll wager he'd agree with me.
Wilkins: Three. Wet a blanket in cold spring water and hang it over the barrel on the worst days. The water dries off and cools the wood, the same as sweat cools a horse.
Wilkins: Four. When the bubbling slows to a lazy belch every few breaths and the mash tastes dry, not sweet, it's done. Don't wait for the skeeters to tell you.
Silas: And here's the part that matters to me, the still itself. Tell them about the worm tub, Doctor.
Wilkins: Silas is right, and this is the most important thing I'll say tonight. In summer, the water in your condenser tub gets warm. You run your still, the hot vapor comes down the worm, and the water around it heats up like a bath. Warm water doesn't condense the vapor well. Some of that spirit goes out the end of the worm as vapor, not liquid, and that vapor will burn. I saw a man in Gilmanton who had his worm tub run warm on a July night with a lantern hanging by the spout. The vapor found the flame, and there was a soft whump and a blue flash. He lost his eyebrows, his beard, and the hair off both arms, and the still-house went up in about the time it takes to say the Lord's Prayer. He stood in the road in his smoking drawers watching it burn and the skeeters found his bare, singed hide before the embers cooled.
Silas: That's why I built the log pipe from the Catamount spring. Cold water in, constant. Keep the tub cold, keep it topped up, and keep the fire and the lanterns well away from where the spirit comes out.
Wilkins: And keep the fire under the pot low and steady. A roaring fire pushes vapor faster than any worm can cool it. The fire's there to coax, not to bully.
Wilkins: Now, the cuts, since I won't have anybody leaving here without them. The first spirit to drip from the worm is the foreshots, the sharpest stuff in the run. It smells like a hot nail and a bottle of varnish, and it carries the poison that blinds and kills. It goes in the dirt, never in a jar, never in a cup, never used to rinse a sore tooth, I don't care how cheap your cousin is. Next come the heads, still harsh, still hot in the nose and heavy on the headache, and they go aside too. Then the hearts, the sweet clean middle of the run, which is what a man saves. And at the end come the tails. That's where most of the fusel oil my summer-sick yeast made ends up: oily, wet-dog smelling, it clouds when you add water. Set it aside for the next run. A hot summer mash makes more of those tails, so you cut earlier at the back end and you don't get greedy.
Silas: And it's the copper that cleans up the stink. A summer mash that ran too hot comes off with more of that rotten-egg, struck-match smell. Bright copper takes it out in the vapor path. That's why I clean the inside of my swan necks with vinegar and salt after a run till they shine like a new penny. Dull copper is lazy copper.
Wilkins: And I'll remind every listener the law of the land is the law of the land. Making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against United States law, and everything said on this program is for history and learning. That's the voice of a man who's been arrested twice, so you may trust he knows the inside of the matter.
Wilkins: Silas, thank you kindly. You've been a better guest than most of my patients and a damn sight better company than my bear.
Silas: Thank you, Doctor. And I want it on record, the mash fermented from the heat.
Wilkins: So recorded. Liar's license revoked.
♪ Banjo bridge
Myths, And A Voice From Carolina
Wilkins: We've got a message on the cylinder, all the way from the Carolina hills. Let's hear it.
♦ Scratchy cylinder change, crackle intensifies, a distant hum
Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Crackle fades
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, I'm glad to hear your voice, and you've got the right name for mosquito country, because I'll bet you can jump clean out of your boots when one of those Carolina gallinippers gets you on the ankle. Now. Your uncle. I respect the man, he's carrying an old tradition, and I'm going to tell him straight anyway, because that's what an old dentist does.
Wilkins: Let's start with the hickory ashes. Up here in New England every farm boy knows what wood ash is good for. You pour water through a hopper of ashes, and what drips out the bottom is lye. Potash. Our grandfathers boiled it down in big iron kettles and hauled it to market by the barrel. It was the cash crop of every stump farm in New Hampshire. They made soap from it, and glass. Lye will eat the skin off your hands and the hair off a hog. So when your uncle throws hickory ashes into a keg of hot liquid, what he's making is a weak soap kettle. It doesn't clean out bad heads. The heads are the spirits that boil off first and fast, and the only way to be rid of them is to catch them in their own jar at the start of the run and throw them away. No ash, no herb, no prayer will pull them out once they're in.
Wilkins: Lye is what you make soap from, Rabbit, and if your uncle's been putting it in his drink, that explains why the whole family talks so clean.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. That's a little different, and I'll give your uncle half a point. Oak puts color and flavor into spirit. That's why a man lets whiskey sit in a barrel for a few seasons: it comes out amber and tastes of wood and vanilla and a little smoke. So oak shavings in the thump keg will give the spirit a woody taste, and maybe a little tint. But the bad heads? Still there, every drop. His red oak shavings make the keg taste like a sawmill floor, and they clean the heads about as well as a sawmill floor cleans a parson.
Wilkins: I'll tell you a true one. There was an old man up in Loudon who swore by sassafras root in his doubler. Said it chased out the poison. Every year at haying time he'd bring a jug to the Pittsfield fair, and every year some poor soul would come to my dental chair the next morning holding his head like a cracked egg. The root made it smell like root beer and hide the harshness. Hiding the poison is worse than leaving it plain. A man can smell trouble in a raw run, but he can't smell it under a sweet root. The Loudon man died at ninety-one, mind you, but I credit that to never drinking his own product.
Wilkins: So here's my verdict, Rabbit, and I'll strike it in copper to make it official.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Ashes and shavings in the keg: swamp medicine, struck and stamped. The cure for bad heads is a careful cut and a jar thrown in the dirt. I've just stamped a Liberty-head cent with my mark, G. G. Wilkins, Pittsfield, N.H., and if you ever come north it's yours. Bring your uncle. I'll pull one of his teeth for free and he can put ashes on that.
Wilkins: Now, since this is a mosquito night, I'll knock down one more myth. Every old soldier and every lumberjack in this state will tell you a man with whiskey in his blood won't get bitten. Skeeters can't stand the taste of liquor, they say. Friends, I spent the worst mosquito summer in Suncook Valley history with more rye in my veins than water, and I was eaten alive. The men who'd been at the jug got it worst of all. Stand around a barn raising at dusk and see who's slapping: the sober deacon or the fellow who's been behind the woodpile with a jug. I've watched it a hundred times. Whiskey keeps off skeeters the way a bell on a cow keeps off wolves: it only tells them where supper is.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Struck down and stamped. And while I'm at it: some folks rub pennyroyal on their necks to keep the bugs off. It does help a little, rubbed on or hung in a bunch. But do not drink pennyroyal oil for any reason. It's poison, and it's killed people who took it as a cure. Pennyroyal will keep the bugs off your neck, and if you drink it, it'll keep the undertaker on your porch. Smudge pots, mosquito bars over the bed, and a hat with netting are better. And cover your rain barrels, because that's where the little devils are born.
♦ Mosquito whine, slap
Wilkins: Seven. I'm keeping count, Barnaby.
♦ Bear grunts
♪ Slow fiddle under
Sign-Off
Wilkins: Well, friends, that's the war. I can't say I won it. The frost won it in September, the way the frost always does, and I took the credit, the way I always do. But if you want to learn the craft the honest way, from cooking the mash to the copper to the cuts, without singeing your eyebrows off or getting eaten in a marsh, you ought to sign on for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I teach it plain, I teach it true, and I'll roast you no worse than you deserve. Barnaby attends every session from the window and has not yet failed a student. He has eaten one, but that's not the same thing. Inquire at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield. And here's our man with one more quick word.
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is built of heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper and built to last. Order yours today at moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com, or visit the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28!
Wilkins: My thanks to Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, to Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro, to Deputy Pound, wherever his breeches are now, and to every one of you with a welt on your neck tonight. Scratch it once for me.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme rises, then fades into wax cylinder crackle