ind here a choppy sea of small
mountains, with hollows running toward all points of the compass.
Instead of Chinese walls, we now have Chinese puzzles. The innate
perversity of such configuration grows more and more exasperating as we
toil westward. In the two hundred miles from the Greenbrier to the
Kentucky River, the ridges are all but unscalable, and the streams
sprangle in every direction like branches of mountain laurel.

The only roads follow the beds of tortuous and rock-strewn water
courses, which may be nearly dry when you start out in the morning, but
within an hour may be raging torrents. There are no bridges. One may
ford a dozen times in a mile. A spring "tide" will stop all travel, even
from neighbor to neighbor, for a day or two at a time. Buggies and
carriages are unheard of. In many districts the only means of
transportation is with saddlebags on horseback, or with a "tow sack"
afoot. If the pedestrian tries a short-cut he will learn what the
natives mean when they say: "Goin' up, you can might' nigh stand up
straight and bite the ground; goin' down, a man wants hobnails in the
seat of his pants."

James Lane Allen was not writing fiction when he said of the far-famed
Wilderness Road into Kentucky: "Despite all that has been done to
civilize it since Boone traced its course in 1790, this honored historic
thoroughfare remains to-day as it was in the beginning, with all its
sloughs and sands, its mud and holes, and jutting ledges of rock and
loose boulders, and twists and turns, and general total depravity....
One such road was enough. They are said to have been notorious for
profanity, those who came into Kentucky from this side. Naturally. Many
were infidels--there are roads that make a man lose faith. It is known
that the more pious companies of them, as they traveled along, would now
and then give up in despair, sit down, raise a hymn, and have prayers
before they could go further. Perhaps one of the provocations to
homicide among the mountain people should be reckoned this road. I have
seen two of the mildest of men, after riding over it for a few hours,
lose their temper and begin to fight--fight their horses, fight the
flies, fight the cobwebs on their noses."

Such difficulties of intercommunication are enough to explain the
isolation of the mountaineers. In the more remote regions this
loneliness reaches a degree almost unbelievable. Miss Ellen Semple, in a
fine monograph published in the _Ge