forest of the
Great Smoky Mountains. Squat in the foreground sat one of the rudest log
huts I had ever seen, a tiny one-room shack, without window, cellar, or
loft, and without a sawed board showing in its construction. A thin curl
of smoke rose from one end of the cabin, not from a chimney, but from a
mere semi-circle of stones piled four feet high around a hole cut
through the log wall. The stones of this fireplace were not even
plastered together with mud, nor had the builder ever intended to raise
the pile as high as the roof to guard his premises against the imminent
risk of fire. Two low doors of riven boards stood wide open, opposite
each other. These, helped by wide crevices between the unchinked logs,
served to let in some sunlight, and quite too much of the raw November
air. The surroundings were squalid and filthy beyond anything I had
hitherto witnessed in the mountains. As I approached, wading ankle-deep
in muck that reached to the doorsill, two pigs scampered out through the
opposite door.

Within the hut I found only a slip of a girl, rocking a baby almost as
big as herself, and trying to knit a sock at the same time. She was
toasting her bare toes before the fire, and crooning in a weird minor
some mountain ditty that may have been centuries old.

I shivered as I looked at this midget, comparing her only garment, a
torn calico dress, with my own stout hunter's garb that seemed none too
warm for such a day as this.

Knowing that the sudden appearance of a stranger would startle the girl,
I chose the quickest way to reassure her by saluting in the vernacular:

"Howdy?"

"Howdy?" she gasped.

"Who lives here?"

"Tom Kirby."

"Kirby? Oh! yes, I know him--we've been hunting together. Is your father
at home?"

"No, he's out somewheres."

"Where is your mother?"

"She's in the field, up yan, gittin' roughness."

I took some pride in not being stumped by this answer. "Roughness," in
mountain lingo, is any kind of rough fodder, specifically corn fodder.

"How far is it to the next house?"

"I don't know; maw, she knows."

"All right; I'll find her."

I went up to the field. No one was in sight; but a shock of fodder was
walking away from me, and I conjectured that "maw's" feet were under it;
so I hailed:

"Hello!"

The shock turned around, then tumbled over, and there stood revealed a
bare-headed, bare-footed woman, coarse featured but of superb
physique--one of those mountain giantesses