Smoky Mountains,
and its denizens could but tremble at the menace.

Few and feeble folk were they. The volunteering spirit rife in the early
days of the Civil War had wrought the first depletion in the number.
Then came, as time wore on, the rigors of the conscription, with an
extension of the limits of age from the very young to the verge of the
venerable, thus robbing, as was said, both the cradle and the grave. Now
only the ancient weaklings and the frail callow remained of the male
population among the women and girls, who seemed mere supernumeraries in
the scheme of creation, rated by the fitness to bear arms.

So feeble a community of non-combatants might hardly compass a warlike
affront calculated to warrant reprisal, but the predominant Union spirit
of East Tennessee was all a-pulse in the Cove, and the deed was no
trifle.

"'T war Ethelindy's deed," her grandfather mumbled, his quivering lips
close to the knob of his stick, on which his palsied, veinous hands
trembled as he sat in his arm-chair on the broad hearth of the main room
in his little log cabin.

Ethelinda Brusie glanced quickly, furtively, at his pondering, wrinkled
old face under the broad brim of his white wool hat, which he still
wore, though indoors and with the night well advanced. Then she fixed
her anxious, excited blue eyes once more on the flare of the fire.

"Lawd! ye jes' now f'und that out, dad?" exclaimed her widowed mother,
busied in her evening task of carding wool on one side of the deep
chimney, built of clay and sticks, and seeming always the imminent prey
of destruction. But there it had stood for a hundred years, dispensing
light and warmth and cheer, itself more inflammable than the great
hickory logs that had summer still among their fibres and dripped sap
odorously as they sluggishly burned.

Ethelinda cast a like agitated glance on the speaker, then her gaze
reverted to the fire. She had the air of being perched up, as if to
escape the clutching waves of calamity, as she sat on a high, inverted
splint basket, her feet not touching the puncheons of the rude floor,
one hand drawing close about her the red woollen skirt of her dress. She
seemed shrunken even from her normal small size, and she listened to the
reproachful recital of her political activity with a shrinking dismay on
her soft, roseate face.

"Nuthin' would do Ethelindy," her granny lifted an accusatory voice,
still knitting briskly, though she looked rebuki