ever will be broken now.

In addition to the geological and botanical curiosities the mountains
afford, my companion had been moved alternately to tears and smiles by
the scenes and people we met--their quaint speech and patient poverty.
We passed eleven deserted homesteads in one day. Sometimes a lean cur
yelped forlorn welcome: at one a poor cow lowed at the broken paddock
and dairy. We passed a poor man with five little children--the eldest
ten or twelve, the youngest four or five--their little stock on a
small donkey, footing their way over the hills across Tennessee into
Georgia. It was so pitiful to see the poor little babes-in-the-wood on
that forlorn journey; and yet they were so brave, and the poor fellow
cheered them and praised them, as well he might. Another miserable
picture was at the white cottage near our camp. The lawn showed
evidences of an old taste in rare flowers and vines, now choked with
weeds. I knocked, and a slovenly negress opened the door and revealed
the sordid interior--an unspread bed; a foul table, sickly with the
smell of half-eaten food and unwashed dishes; the central figure a
poor, helpless old man sitting on a stool, I asked the negress for
her master: she answered rudely that she had no master, and would have
slammed the door in my face. Why tell the story of a life surrounded
by taste and womanly adornments, followed by a childless, wifeless old
age? The poor, wizened old creature was rotting in life on that
low stool among his former dependants, their support and scorn. The
Emancipation Proclamation did not reach him. But one power could break
his bonds and restore the fallen son and the buried wife--the great
liberator, Death.

The natives of this region are characterized by marked peculiarities
of the anatomical frame. The elongation of the bones, the contour
of the facial angle, the relative proportion or disproportion of the
extremities, the loose muscular attachment of the ligatures, and the
harsh features were exemplified in the notable instance of the late
President Lincoln. A like individuality appears in their idiom. It
lacks the Doric breadth of the Virginian of the other slope, and is
equally removed from the soft vowels and liquid intonation of the
southern plain. It has verbal and phraseological peculiarities of its
own. Bantering a Tennessee wife on her choice, she replied with a toss
and a sparkle, "I-uns couldn't get shet of un less'n I-uns married
un." "Have you