Courting by Lantern Light
Dr. G. G. Wilkins covers how New England's young folks courted around their parents in the 1860s: Sunday-night sparking, the courting candle, the whispering rod, husking-bee red ears, kissing bridges and lamp signals in the window. He also tells how Barnaby the bear ended a rival suitor's career on a Pittsfield moonlit night. Wilkes County runner Junior Vance brings brand-new stories of courting a deacon's daughter by headlight code and hiding an engagement ring in a church-supper jar of apple butter. In the call-in segment Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, then knocks down the blue-flame myth between strikes on his anvil.
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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
Wilkins: Barnaby. BARNABY. Settle your great flea-ridden carcass down. That is not a courting couple out by the woodpile, you jealous old sack of suet, that is two raccoons, and they have better manners than half the young men in Merrimack County. Lie down. Lie DOWN. There. He has been in a sour mood since April. Nobody has come courting him, and between you and me nobody is going to.
♦ Barnaby lets out a long, wounded grunt; chain drags across frozen dirt
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling, then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening, and welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins. I am broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your dentist, your blacksmith, your alchemist, and the reason the county sheriff takes his supper standing up. Tonight we talk about the oldest distillation in the world, older than copper and older than corn: two young fools, one lantern, and a pair of parents who will not go to bed. Tonight is Courting by Lantern Light. Before we start, a quick word from the man who sells the copper.
♪ A bright, quick banjo sting
Announcer: Friends! One quick word! The Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, is handcrafted of heavy-gauge pure copper and built to last longer than your grandfather's excuses! See it at moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Sting resolves; fiddle fades
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; a log settles in the stove
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. How a young man of New England got at a young woman, and how her mother stopped him.
Wilkins: Here in the Suncook Valley we do not call it courting. We call it sparking. A boy goes sparking of a Sunday night. He washes behind his ears for the first time since the Mexican War, greases his hair with lard till the cats follow him, puts on his one good collar, and walks the turnpike to her father's door with a lantern in his fist and his heart somewhere south of his belt buckle. And I mean his heart. Clean minds, gentlemen. Clean minds.
Wilkins: Then he is shown into the best room, the parlor. Nobody uses that room but the minister, the dead, and the young man come sparking. It is cold as a tomb and it smells of horsehair sofa and camphor. He sits on one end of that sofa, the girl sits on the other, and her mother sits in the doorway knitting a sock that has been the same sock since Polk was President. The father is in the kitchen, loudly cleaning a gun he does not need cleaned.
Wilkins: Now you have heard of the courting candle. That is a spiral of black iron with a candle in it. The legend says the old man twists the candle up or down to set how long the young man may stay, and when it burns to the iron, out he goes. Good story. I believe about half of it. The historians say it is an ordinary candlestick that grew a romance in the retelling, and I side with the historians, because I have never met a New Hampshire father who would spend a whole candle on a boy. A courting candle burns about as long as a young man's nerve, and a good deal longer than his conversation.
Wilkins: Then there is the whispering rod. Some call it the courting stick. It is a hollow tube six feet long or better. The girl puts one end to her ear, the boy puts his lips to the other, and with the whole family sitting there by the fire they whisper to each other down the tube. Six feet of hollow tube so a boy can say sweet nothings across a room, and most boys have exactly six feet of nothing to say. I knew one fellow over in Chichester who got so worked up he sneezed into it. Blew a pint of snuff and worse straight into the girl's ear. She married a Gilmanton man the next spring, and I hear she still cannot hear thunder on her left side.
Wilkins: When my grandfather was young there was bundling. Lord, there was bundling. Winters were cold and firewood was dear, and a boy who had walked eight miles through the drifts could not well be thrown back out into them at midnight. So they put the young pair in one bed, both of them fully dressed, sometimes with the girl sewn into a sack to her armpits and a board nailed straight down the middle. Bundling was a bed, a board, and a mother's prayer, and of the three, the board was the only one anybody trusted. The preachers of the last century roared against it from the pulpit, and the custom mostly died out before I cut my first tooth. I will say no more about what grew up around that board, except that New England has a great many seven-month babies on its gravestones, and every one of them was a fine big healthy child.
♦ Barnaby snorts outside, as if in disapproval
Wilkins: Even Barnaby blushes. Now. If you could not get her alone in the parlor, you got her alone at work. The husking bee. Come October the whole neighborhood piles into a barn, sits in the corn up to their knees, and strips ears by lantern light. The law of the bee is this: find a red ear and you may kiss the girl of your choice. I have seen boys husk a whole barn bare for a red ear and then faint dead away when they found one. I have also seen a sly young man from Loudon bring his own red ear in his coat, and that is the most honest bit of planning a Loudon man ever did. The girls, mind you, were not fools. A girl who found a red ear would hide it in her apron and wait to see who was worth it, which is how a woman has done business since Eve.
Wilkins: Then there was the singing school. Fifty young people in the meetinghouse two nights a week, learning to shape-note sing the old fuguing tunes. The music was dreadful, but the walk home was splendid, two by two down the dark road, and the singing master understood that perfectly well, which is why he was paid in cider.
Wilkins: And sleighing. A sleigh ride is the courting man's best friend, being a buffalo robe, a cold night, and an excuse. On every road in this valley you will find a covered bridge, and the young folks call them kissing bridges, because for those few seconds inside the dark you are hidden from God, from Mother, and from every gossiping biddy in the village. A smart lad drove his horse through those bridges at a crawl. A smarter lad trained his horse to stop in the middle. A horse named Deacon down Epsom way stopped in the middle of the Suncook bridge so regular that three marriages came of it, and when he died the families clubbed together for a headstone.
Wilkins: Now the lantern. The lantern is the hero of tonight's tale. Your grandmother's was pierced tin, punched full of holes in stars and circles, and it threw speckles across the snow like a sky full of freckles. My own courting lantern had more holes punched in it than my reputation, and it let out less light. These last few years we have had kerosene, the coal oil, and I tell you true it changed courting forever. Under a candle any boy looks handsome. Under a bright kerosene lamp, a father can see the young man plain, and half the matches in New Hampshire were called off on the spot.
Wilkins: The lantern was also the telegraph of love. A girl hangs a lamp in the east window, Father is asleep. She moves it to the west window, Father is awake and loading. She blows it out, go home, you fool, and try again next Sabbath. Every young lad on the turnpike could read his sweetheart's window better than he could read Scripture.
Wilkins: Those who went to the mills had it harder. Up the road in the big textile towns, the mill girls lived in company boardinghouses under rules stricter than any Concord prison, and the door was locked at ten o'clock sharp. A Pittsfield girl who went down to the mills told me that at five minutes to ten the street outside that boardinghouse sounded like a henhouse with a fox in it, all the kissing and sighing and running. At ten it was dead quiet but for one boy left pounding on the door with his hat in his hand.
Wilkins: Then came the war, and courting went into the mailbag. The boys marched south and the letters marched north, and every one had a little photograph tucked in it, the carte de visite, a picture no bigger than a playing card. Every girl in Pittsfield had a dozen of them in her Bible, of boys in blue standing stiff as fence posts. The valentines came too, the lace-paper kind. Miss Esther Howland down in Worcester made them famous, a whole business of paper lace and painted hearts. I bought one in 1858 for a girl in Barnstead. She sent it back with my spelling corrected.
♪ Short fiddle transition, mournful then jaunty
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Legends, outlaws, and the business of romance at Fort Wilkins.
Wilkins: I have something to confess. I made a pretty penny off love. Literally a pretty penny, and a pretty dime besides. A young man comes to my anvil with a silver dime. I file the face of it clean off, smooth as a baby's backside, and then I punch his initials and hers into the silver, with a little heart if he pays extra, and he gives it to his girl to wear on a chain around her neck. A love token, they call it. I have shaved more silver dimes smooth than I ever shaved my own chin, and the dimes are better for it.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There was a fellow from Epsom, a long drink of water with ears like barn doors and a mustache that would not commit, who came in and bought two love tokens. Two. Identical. Both said 'Forever Thine' with a little heart. I asked him what he needed two for, and he said one was a spare, in case he lost it. He did not lose it. He gave one to each of the Bickford sisters, Prudence and Temperance, both grown and both with forearms like a cooper. On Sunday morning those two girls compared necklaces in the meetinghouse pew. They finished his courting for him on the church steps with a hymnal apiece. He came to me on Monday for two teeth to be pulled, which the hymnals had loosened in advance. I charged him half, because he had done half my work for me.
Wilkins: Now the story you came for. Barnaby and the Barnstead boy.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks, like a dog hearing its name
Wilkins: Yes, you, you old brute. Some years ago I had a hired woman working at Fort Wilkins, a fine strapping widow of twenty-six who could split cordwood faster than I could. Every unmarried man from here to Alton came sparking after her. Most of them had the sense to come up the front path with a lantern held high and a ham bone in the pocket for Barnaby. But one, a Barnstead man named Ezra, all brass buttons, cologne and self-regard, decided he would come round the back through the woodlot on a moonlit night and tap on her window like a fellow in a story-paper. Barnaby lives round the back.
Wilkins: Ezra wore a long-tailed coat. And that coat, God help him, he had carried a smoked shoulder of pork home in the night before, so to a bear it smelt like Christmas morning. He stepped over the chain in the dark. I heard the chain go taut, and a sound like a wet sheet being torn down the middle, and then a scream so high it set off every dog in Pittsfield and a rooster that was not due up for six hours.
Wilkins: Barnaby took the coattails first. Then, being a thorough animal, he went back for the seat of the breeches, the drawers under that, and a good half-dollar's worth of what was under the drawers. I ran out with the lantern and there was Ezra, legging it down the Suncook road with his bare hindquarters shining in the moonlight. He was so bright the ladies of Pittsfield thought a second moon had come up over Catamount, and a sorry, lopsided, bleeding moon it was. He left a trail of blood and brass buttons all the way to the Barnstead line, and squished in his left boot for a mile. Barnaby sat on his haunches chewing that coattail like a sailor with a plug of tobacco, and every so often he spat a button at me.
Wilkins: Now I am a healing man. I sent a jar of salve over to Barnstead next morning, and a note to say that if he wished to sit down before haying season he should try a feather cushion and repentance. Barnaby does not object to courting. He objects to strangers, ham-scented coats, and men from Barnstead, which is the same list as every girl's father in town. The widow married a Northwood carpenter who came up the front path like a Christian. Barnaby wore that coattail for a pillow two winters running.
♪ Banjo roll, a touch of fiddle
Wilkins: My guest tonight knows a thing or two about slipping past folks who would like to stop him. He comes to us from Wilkes County, North Carolina, from up in those Brushy Mountains, and he has driven more dark roads than any lantern-carrying Romeo in New England. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Junior Vance.
Junior: Thank you, Doc. I tell you what, that is the first time a man has ever opened up a conversation with me by tellin' me about another man's backside. I believe I'm gonna like it up here.
Wilkins: We start with the backside in New Hampshire, Junior. It saves time. Now, our subject is courting around the parents. Did you have to get around a girl's daddy?
Junior: Doc, I had to get around, over, under and through the meanest daddy in the Brushies. Her name was Lorene Pruitt, prettiest thing you ever saw, hair like a crow's wing. Her daddy was Deacon Amos Pruitt, a Baptist deacon who sat on that front porch every night of his life with a twelve-gauge across one knee and a Bible across the other. And I never once saw him open that Bible.
Wilkins: A deacon on a porch with a shotgun and a Bible is the most persuasive argument in Christendom, and he does not need the Bible. So how did you get word to her?
Junior: Headlights. Their place sat down in a holler, and there was a ridge road up above it. I'd come along that ridge late, kill the engine, and coast, quiet as a snake in wet grass. Then I'd flash the headlights twice. Two flashes. If she was clear, she'd raise the kitchen lamp and set it down again. Up, down. That meant meet me at the spring house in fifteen minutes.
Wilkins: The same as our girls with the window lamp. Love has one alphabet, Junior.
Junior: Well, one night I flashed twice, and down in the holler I saw a flash all right. Big orange one, and then a BOOM rollin' up that ridge like the Lord clearin' His throat. That wasn't Lorene raisin' the lamp. That was the Deacon answerin' the mail. Birdshot rattled off my fender like hail on a tin roof. I didn't wait for a second message.
Wilkins: A man who answers love letters with birdshot is a man who means it. Did you try to win the old man over, or just outrun him?
Junior: Doc, he made me get religion. Told me no boy walks his daughter home that hadn't been to every night of the summer revival. Every night, Doc. Six weeks, under a tent, in August, in North Carolina. It was hotter than the hinges. Preacher hollerin', women faintin', a feller in the back handlin' a copperhead that looked about as tired of it as I was.
Wilkins: Did it take?
Junior: Took twice. Second week I went down front and got saved, 'cause Lorene was watchin'. Fifth week the Deacon walked in late and missed it, so I went down front and got saved again. Once for the Lord and once for Lorene. The preacher squinted at me like a man pricin' a mule, but he dunked me anyway.
Wilkins: Junior got saved twice in one summer, and I have never been saved once, though I have been arrested twice, which in Merrimack County counts as a baptism. Now, Junior, there is always a rival. Every girl worth sparking has two dogs at her door.
Junior: Oh, there was a rival. Name of Dwayne. His daddy was a county deputy, and Dwayne had about two brain cells, and they was both out lookin' for the third. One Saturday night Lorene and me headed down to the river, and here comes Dwayne behind us in his daddy's patrol car. No lights, figurin' he'd catch us sparkin' and run tell the Deacon.
Wilkins: A deputy's boy in a deputy's carriage. My heart is already breaking for the lad.
Junior: So I took a left onto an old loggin' road I'd run a thousand times in the dark. There's a switchback up there, and right at the bottom of the switchback old man Hollis kept his hogs in a wallow about the size of a church. I knew the turn was there. Dwayne didn't. I cut it tight, and Dwayne went straight on, nose-first, slap into the hog wallow. Mud up to the door handles, and about nine hogs come over to see what the Lord had sent 'em. One big sow got her front feet up on the hood and stood there grunting through the windshield at him like she was takin' his confession.
Wilkins: The hog wallow did more to cool that deputy's boy than any sermon his daddy ever sat through.
Junior: Took a mule and two of Hollis's boys to drag that car out at sunup. Dwayne smelled like a hog lot till Thanksgiving. His daddy had to explain the mud to the county, and he told 'em he was pursuin' a suspect. And I reckon he was. Suspect got away.
Wilkins: Now, I suspect, Junior, that courting and your line of work rubbed elbows now and again.
Junior: Doc, courtin' was the best cover a runner ever had. I'm gonna tell you this one 'cause the statute of limitations has done run off and got married. One night I had a load in the trunk, and the law was settin' up a roadblock ahead. So I pulled off onto the lovers' lane up by the water tower, cut the lights, and Lorene, bless her, scooted over close. Here comes a deputy, walks up, shines his flashlight in the window. He sees two young folks... well, courtin', Doc, I'll leave it at that. That deputy turned red as a beet, said 'Pardon me, folks, evenin',' tipped his hat to Lorene, and walked off. Never looked at the trunk. And that car was settin' so low in the back the bumper was about kissin' the gravel.
Wilkins: Ha! The deputies in this county court the law the way a cat courts a bathtub: from a distance, complaining, and only when somebody is watching. So, did you ever win the deacon, or did you steal the girl?
Junior: I won him, sort of. Saved up for a ring, little bitty diamond you'd need a magnifyin' glass and a prayer to see. Church supper that fall, Lorene's mama brought her famous apple butter in a quart jar. I slipped that ring down in the top of it and told Lorene to go fetch the apple butter for her biscuit. But before she got there, the preacher reached in with his knife and went to spreadin'. I saw a little sparkle on his biscuit headed for his mouth. Lorene saw it too. That girl came across that fellowship hall like a bobcat, caught that preacher by the wrist and hollered 'Don't you EAT that, that's MINE!' The whole church got quiet. The Deacon looked at the biscuit, looked at me, and said, 'Well, I reckon you better ask her proper, then.'
Wilkins: A man who will hide a diamond in apple butter will hide anything, and I would trust him with my still and nobody's daughter. Did she say yes?
Junior: She said yes with apple butter on her fingers, and we been married forty-some years. The Deacon came around. He never did put the shotgun up, but he started leavin' it unloaded when I came to Sunday dinner. That's love in the Brushy Mountains, Doc.
Wilkins: Junior Vance, of Wilkes County, North Carolina, twice saved, once engaged, and not one hog the worse for it. Thank you, sir.
Junior: Thank you, Doc. And you keep that bear away from my coattails.
♦ Barnaby grunts thoughtfully outside the window
♪ Banjo transition into a brisk, carnival-like pitchman's tune
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♪ Pitchman's tune ends with a flourish
♦ Wax crackle; the steady drip into the glass jar returns
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the craft, or how a still is run by lantern light without burning down your barn, your eyebrows, and your marriage prospects.
Wilkins: A word first, plain and sober. Running a still to make liquor for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and tonight's talk is history and schooling only. I have been to court twice already, and I do not need company.
Wilkins: Most stills in this valley are run at night, and night means lanterns, and lanterns are where the fools die. Hear me. The vapor of spirit is heavier than the air. It does not float up politely like pipe smoke. It creeps along the floor like a snake looking for a warm boot. You set your lantern on the floor beside the still, and some night a little vapor slips out a loose joint, crawls along the boards, finds that flame, and then you are not a distiller anymore. You are a story people tell. I saw a still-house up toward Gilmanton go up like that. The man got out, but he left his eyebrows, his beard, and most of the skin off the backs of his hands on the doorframe. His hands came up in blisters the size of hen's eggs. When they broke, the water ran down his wrists and the skin came off in sheets like wet paper off a wall. He held a fork like a crab for the rest of his life. So hang your lantern HIGH, on a hook, well back from the still and especially from the end of the worm where the spirit runs out. Keep a bucket of sand and a wet blanket by the door. Check every joint with your fingers before you light the fire. And never let a courting couple bring a candle into the still-house, because they will not be watching the flame.
Wilkins: Now the mash. I will give you the way my own corn has been made. Take eight pounds of cracked corn and five gallons of water. Bring it to a slow boil, stirring, and cook it an hour or more until it is thick as porridge and smells like a Thanksgiving pudding. Let it cool till it is hot as you could bear a bath, and stir in two pounds of malted barley, crushed. The malt has the magic in it, the ferments that turn the starch of the corn into sugar. Stir it, cover it, let it sit an hour or two and sweeten. Then let it cool to blood-warm or a touch under, pitch in your yeast, and set it somewhere warm and airy with a cloth over the top. For five to seven days it will bubble and heave and grumble like a parson after a short collection plate. When it goes quiet and the cap falls and it tastes dry and sour, you have your wash. That is a weak beer of a few parts in a hundred of spirit, and the still will make a gentleman of it.
Wilkins: Note this for you cider-country people: if you make brandy from apples or pears, mind yourselves double. The fruit has pectin in it, the stuff that sets a jelly, and as fruit ferments that pectin breaks down into wood spirit, which is methanol, the blinding poison. A fruit mash makes more of it than a grain mash. Old Pittsfield applejack men who were careless went blind at fifty. Some of them went to Concord to the doctor and some went to the churchyard, and nobody had to ask which was which.
Wilkins: Now the cuts. Light your fire low and slow. The first drops that come off the worm are the foreshots. Out they go. A good teacupful at least for every five gallons of wash, and I throw out more than the rule, because the rule never had to bury anybody. Foreshots stink of glue and lamp solvent, and they hold the worst of the wood spirit. Pour them on the ground, use them to clean your tools, but never in a mouth.
Wilkins: After the foreshots come the heads. The heads are sharp and hot, and they smell of nail polish and pear drops and the headache you will have on Wednesday. Set them aside in their own jars. Do not drink them, and do not blend them in out of greed.
Wilkins: Then the hearts. The hearts come off sweet and clean and smell of the grain. They are what a good distiller is after. Collect your run in many small jars, a dozen or twenty, and number every one by lantern light with a wax pencil, because that way you can make the cut by nose and patience instead of guesswork. Then come the tails. They run oily and soft and smell of wet dog and old cardboard, and they make a cloudy, greasy rainbow on top of water. Set them aside to run again with the next charge.
Wilkins: Here is the alchemy, and why I am a copper man to the bone. The fermenting mash makes sulfur, those foul rotten-egg vapors, and copper takes hold of them and keeps them. Most of that work is done where the hot vapor touches the metal: the cap, the vapor pipe, and the coils of the worm. That is why copper in the vapor path is worth more than copper anywhere else. A pot of iron with a copper worm will do better than a pot of copper with an iron worm. The copper gives itself up a little at a time to clean your spirit, the way a good dentist gives up a little of his reputation with every molar.
♦ Wax crackle; drip continues
Wilkins: And one more thing from the Fort Wilkins workbench: a still is like a sweetheart. Let your fire run too hot and you will scorch the mash, puke the wash up the pipe, and blow out the cap. Go gentle, keep your eye on her, and do not leave her alone in the night with a stranger's flame.
♪ Fiddle reel, quick
♦ A wax cylinder being changed; hiss, then a scratchy recorded voice begins
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, slang, and the call-in line. We have a recorded message all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, which is Junior's own country.
Cletus (on tape): 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?
♦ Tape hiss fades
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro! A fine question, and a fine name. A man is called Rabbit either because he is fast or because he is fruitful, and I will not ask which.
Wilkins: Now, hickory ash. What is wood ash, Rabbit? It is potash. It is what every farm wife in New Hampshire leaches with water in her ash hopper to make lye, and boils with hog fat to make soap. Throw it into your thump keg and the hot vapor bubbles up through a bath of weak lye. What comes out tastes slick and bitter and soapy, like you licked the washboard. It does not take out one drop of wood spirit. The methanol comes over early, in the foreshots and the heads, and the only cure is to throw those out with your own hands and your own good sense. Cletus, your uncle's ashes would make a fine bar of lye soap, and that is the only thing in that thump keg that will ever come out clean.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now, the red oak shavings. That one has a little more history to it, and a little more crookedness. Any cooper in Merrimack County will tell you red oak is no good for a liquor barrel. The wood is full of open pores, little tubes running end to end, and liquor goes right through it. You can put your lips to the end of a red oak stick and blow bubbles through it into a cup of water. White oak has those pores plugged up, which is why white oak holds whiskey. So shavings in the thump keg do one thing. They give the spirit a brown color and a bitter tannin bite, and they make a ten-day-old liquor look like ten years in the barrel.
Wilkins: There was a peddler in Epsom who did exactly that. He charred his red oak shavings in a pan, dropped them in his doubler, and sold the liquor as 'Old Suncook Ten-Year.' That liquor was not ten years old. It was not ten weeks old. Half of it was still warm. One fine widow in Chichester bought a whole red oak keg of it for her husband's wake. She set it on the parlor carpet, and by the time the minister had finished the prayer, it had wept clean through the staves and spread across her best Brussels carpet, which turned the brown of a tobacco-spitter's beard. The mourners were down on their knees on that carpet for the first time in their lives without being asked. The peddler left town in the night, the way peddlers do, and the carpet still smells of it. Red oak holds liquor about as well as a Concord politician holds a secret: it weeps all over the carpet and blames the carpet.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: So Rabbit, the plain truth. Ash in the doubler is soap-making in the wrong place. Shavings are paint for young liquor. And the bad heads come out only one way: the distiller throws them out. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, I am stamping a copper cent for you on this anvil right now. G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Tell your uncle he is welcome at Fort Wilkins any time, as long as he leaves his ash bucket home and brings a ham bone for Barnaby.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin, ringing out
Wilkins: While the anvil is hot, one more myth to strike. Every tavern loafer in New England will tell you to pour a spoon of spirit on a saucer and light it. If it burns blue, it is good and pure. If it burns yellow or red, it has lead in it, or poison. Hogwash. Wood spirit, the very methanol that blinds a man, burns with a pale blue flame of its own, so faint you can hardly see it in daylight. Your blue flame is a pretty thing to show a girl in the dark, but it cannot tell you if what's in your jar will blind you. A blue flame tells you as much about your liquor as a pretty bonnet tells you about the girl's temper. You make the cuts, you keep the lead off your still, and you trust your discipline over any parlor trick with a saucer.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And a little slang for the young folks before we go. When a boy is courting he is 'sparking.' When he is courting two girls at once he is 'running a double still,' and he generally ends up like the Epsom fellow on the church steps. When a girl turns him away she has 'given him the mitten,' and the boy has to walk home 'mittened' in the snow. And when the father catches the boy at the window, it is called 'hearing the hammer,' after the sound a gun makes when it is cocked, and that is the fastest sound in New England.
♪ Theme begins softly under, banjo and fiddle with antique warmth
Wilkins: Before we bank the fire, one last word from our sponsor.
Announcer: Friends, a quick word! The handcrafted Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, built of heavy-gauge pure copper and fine enough for any showroom. Order yours at moonshinestill.com, or come see it at Fort Wilkins on Route 28!
Wilkins: And if you have a mind to learn the craft from the man who has paid for his lessons in fines, burns, and two bear bites, you should sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I teach you copper, mash, fire, and the cuts. I teach you safety first and pride second, and why you never keep a candle, a courting couple, and a still in the same room. Sign up and learn it right, so you never have to learn it the way the Gilmanton man did.
Wilkins: My thanks tonight to Junior Vance of Wilkes County, North Carolina, and to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, and to every young man walking the turnpike tonight with a lantern in his fist. Come up the front path, son. Barnaby is round the back.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks once
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme swells and fades into wax cylinder crackle