t of seventy-six men that I have listed just as they
occurred to me, but four are below average American height and only two
are fat. About two-thirds of them are brawny or sinewy fellows of great
endurance. The others generally are slab-sided, stoop-shouldered, but
withey. The townsfolk and the valley farmers, being better nourished and
more observant of the prime laws of wholesome living, are noticeably
superior in appearance but not in stamina.

Nearly all males of the back country have a grave and deliberate
bearing. They travel with the long, sure-footed stride of the born
woodsman, not graceful and lithe like a moccasined Indian (their coarse
brogans forbid it), but shambling as if every joint had too much play.
There is nothing about them to suggest the Swiss or Tyrolean
mountaineers; rather they resemble the gillies of the Scotch Highlands.
Generally they are lean-faced, sallow, level-browed, with rather high
cheek-bones. Gray eyes predominate, sometimes vacuous, but oftener hard,
searching, crafty--the feral eye of primitive man.

From infancy these people have been schooled to dissimulate and hide
emotion, and ordinarily their faces are as opaque as those of veteran
poker players. Many wear habitually a sullen scowl, hateful and
suspicious, which in men of combative age, and often in the old women,
is sinister and vindictive. The smile of comfortable assurance, the
frank eye of good-fellowship, are rare indeed. Nearly all of the young
people and many of the adults plant themselves before a stranger and
regard him with a fixed stare, peculiarly annoying until one realizes
that they have no thought of impertinence.

Many of the women are pretty in youth; but hard toil in house and field,
early marriage, frequent child-bearing with shockingly poor attention,
and ignorance or defiance of the plainest necessities of hygiene, soon
warp and age them. At thirty or thirty-five a mountain woman is apt to
have a worn and faded look, with form prematurely bent--and what wonder?
Always bending over the hoe in the cornfield, or bending over the hearth
as she cooks by an open fire, or bending over her baby, or bending to
pick up, for the thousandth time, the wet duds that her lord flings on
the floor as he enters from the woods--what wonder that she soon grows
short-waisted and round-shouldered?

The voices of the highland women, low toned by habit, often are
singularly sweet, being pitched in a sad, musical, minor key. W