g of southern mountaineers I mean the mass, or the average, and
the pictures here given are typical of that mass. It is not the
well-to-do valley people, but the real mountaineers, who are especially
interesting to the reading public; and they are interesting _chiefly_
because they preserve traits and manners that have been transmitted
almost unchanged from ancient times--because, as John Fox puts it, they
are "a distinct remnant of an Anglo-Saxon past."

Almost everywhere in the backwoods of Appalachia we have with us to-day,
in flesh and blood, the Indian-fighter of our colonial border--aye, back
of him, the half-wild clansman of elder Britain--adapted to other
conditions, but still virtually the same in character, in ideas, in
attitude toward the outer world. Here, in great part, is spoken to-day
the language of Piers the Ploughman, a speech long dead elsewhere, save
as fragments survive in some dialects of rural England.

No picture of mountain life would be complete or just if it omitted a
class lower than the average hillsman I have been describing. As this is
not a pleasant topic, I shall be terse. Hundreds of backwoods families,
large ones at that, exist in "blind" cabins that remind one somewhat of
Irish hovels, Norwegian saeters, the "black houses" of the Hebrides, the
windowless rock piles inhabited by Corsican shepherds and by Basques of
the Pyrenees. Such a cabin has but one room for all purposes. In rainy
or gusty weather, when the two doors must be closed, no light enters the
room save through cracks in the wall and down the chimney. In the
damp climate of western Carolina such an interior is fusty, or even wet.
In many cases the chimney is no more than a semi-circular pile of rough
rocks and rises no higher than a man's shoulder, hence the common
saying, "You can set by the fire and spit out through the chimbly." When
the wind blows "contrary" one's lungs choke and his eyes stream from the
smoke.

[Illustration: A Bee-Gum]

In some of these places you will find a "pet pig" harbored in the house.
I know of two cases where the pig was kept in a box directly under the
table, so that scraps could be chucked to him without rising from
dinner.

Hastening from this extreme, we still shall find dire poverty the rule
rather than the exception among the multitude of "branch-water people."
One house will have only an earthen floor; another will be so small that
"you cain't cuss a cat in it 'thout gittin' h