derneath their shade the kingfisher and the common sandpiper scud from rock to rock till they vanish over the white sunlit rapids beyond. Shoals of minnows race in the shallows under your horse's feet, and a big chub plunges in the still pool above. The deep boom of the bull-frog sounding from some rushy backwater beats time to the ceaseless chorus of the woodland crickets, and as the day wanes the tinkling of cow-bells in the lanes and woods answers to the musical summons of their owners from the hills above.

And in the meantime the massive outline of the mountains looms nearer and larger. The blue veil of distance is lifted and the mighty wall above us becomes one vast screen of rustling leaves. Houses of even a humble kind grow scarce. The stream gets steeper in its fall, and thunders in an angry fashion against the rugged cliffs and moss-grown rocks that hem in its waters. An old mill, its timbers black with time and weather, totters over an idle wheel. It is the last outpost of southern civilization. The sights and sounds of every-day Virginian life are left behind-the red fallows and the green maize-fields-the shout of the negro ploughman and the summer pipe of the quail. The mountains begin to close around, and the air is full of the noise of falling waters, the scent of cedars and hemlocks, and the steady moan of mountain winds sweeping softly over many miles of leaves. A change of scene more complete within the same short space it would be hard to find. The red clay road winding so lately through cheery rural scenes becomes a stony track painfully toiling upwards between the huge trunks of a dark and sombre forest to the now hidden sky-line three thousand feet above us.

Here is the domain of the mountaineer. Not the romantic, ornamental, somewhat glorified peasant that the word is apt to suggest, but merely one branch of that despised and outcast race of white men that Southern

slavery begot. The Southern "Poor White", of which the mountaineer is certainly the most interesting type, is not himself the outcast of a recent or a single generation. He is the descendant of those who in former days either sunk below the level, or as emigrants began life outside the pale, of those connected directly or indirectly with the domestic institution and the landed interest. Such men in the Free States in the natural order of things would have carved a road to competence if not to fortune. In the Slave States an emigrant without means or education may have done so, but the chances were that the odds were too much for him, and that his children were driven, not by violence or deliberate combinations, but by the force of circumstances, into the rough and waste places of the land. There they have multiplied and stagnated, illiterate, squalid, poor, unambitious, despised by whites and by negroes alike, clinging together, intermarrying and degenerating physically and morally. Not at war exactly with the world, but going through life with a kind of latent animosity towards it as if it had used them ill, and a vague idea that their lot is hard and their chance a poor one. And so it is. Not that a pair of stout arms and a stout heart will not still in America bring a labouring man at least competence; but though the stout arms are there, the energy and the brains to direct them have practically deserted this strange group of the Anglo-Saxon family.

When an American declares that in his country there is no poverty or want outside the city, he is talking nonsense, though nonsense of an honest kind free from all intention to mislead. Not one American in a thousand outside the South Atlantic States knows much more of the Southern Poor White than he knows of the Esquimaux. How can he? Of the mountaineer, the Southern people themselves know scarcely anything, unless it be those few who live right in the

very shadow of the great ranges. Even among the class in question, material prosperity and civilization varies considerably in different states and regions of country. But there is neither space nor need to examine such details. The mountaineer of Blue Ridge, who has been entirely surrounded by a lowland civilization for generations, is on that very account a more curious spectacle than the better fed hunter, for instance, of the vast highlands of West Virginia or the "Cracker" of the boundless back-country that lies behind the sugar and rice plantations and the orange groves of the far South.

It is a popular notion that the Poor or Mean Whites of the South are descended from the indentured servants that were shipped to the Southern colonies from England in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. That there can be anything like uniformity in their origin is impossible. In the ups and downs of colonial and frontier life, men of all sorts must have been jolted off the track, and with the growth of slavery and the comparative contempt for manual labour that always existed in the South sunk out of the race and retired into the forests to live as illiterate hunters or idlers. The position their descendants occupy is at least unique. They are worse off in every respect, save fuel, than the French or Belgian peasant, while the latter in his turn has a harder struggle for existence than the average British labourer. The mountaineer of Blue Ridge cultivates his own land, or land so rough that its owners do not care to interfere with him. He touches his hat to no one. But even in a democratic country where handshaking is a mania and has no social significance, the plainest kind of country farmer does not much care about extending the hand of citizenship to the pariah from the mountains or the pine-barrens. The latter may starve when his meagre corn-crop and his scanty supply of bacon runs out in the early spring, for all the outside world

is concerned or is aware of; and if he does not actually die of starvation, he very often comes quite as near it as the perennial paupers of the Connemara bogs.

To look up at the Blue Ridge from its base you would hardly suppose that a vestige of life lurked beneath that vast green canopy of leaves. A familiar eye might detect here and there the corner of a clearing peeping above the shoulders of the hills, and in early spring clouds of smoke rising from some burning new ground proclaim to the dwellers in the world below that human life of some sort exists up in those wild woods. This indeed is about all the majority of the community ever see of the mountain man. There are exceptions, however, and Pete is an exception. Pete is a veritable chieftain among mountaineers, and at the same time is known in the low country for many miles round. His cabin stands upon the very frontiers of his dominion. At the very foot of the

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big mountain" (as distinguished from the spurs and foothills), right in the angle where the north and south forks of Rumbling Creek tumble their respective waters together in a churning and boiling pool, stands the mansion of this illustrious man. Here, too, with the dividing stream the rough road divides also, and by the side of these stony tracks and on the banks of these rocky streams, reaching far away up to the highest gaps between the mountain peaks, are scattered at long intervals the isolated hovels of Pete's subjects. Pete's house, as I have said, stands as befits his autocratic position at the forks of road and stream, and no one can get up the mountain on business or pleasure bent without undergoing the scrutiny of his ever-watchful eye. The house is comparatively palatial, and the shoulders of the hills have receded sufficiently at this meeting of the waters to leave nearly two acres of flat ground around it, giving an air of ease, solidity and distinction to Pete's ancestral hall that the ordinary mountain cabin de

cidedly lacks. Pete has sown the flat in clover, a wonderful concession to lowland ideas. He has even' planted a dozen or two of young apple-trees, which mark him as a man far in advance of his race. The logs of his house, too, are squared and not merely round poles unbarked, like the architecture higher up the creek. The

chimney is also a departure from other chimneys on Rumbling Creek, for it is of rocks, not of tobacco-sticks filled in with mud.

One other fact places Pete on a pinnacle in his community-he can write! This is the last letter he wrote to me:

DR. SUR, Thars trowte in the Crick by a heap mo' nor lars yer. Cum orn rite soon. Thars tu walers in the hole at the forx. Yrs respefly,

PETE ROBISON.

From this it may be gathered that my acquaintance with Pete and the mountain community on Rumbling Creek, an acquaintance renewed annually for many years, was due to a predilection for the gentle art. No strangers indeed but anglers (and they were scarce enough), unless it were the sheriff or an occasional cattledealer crossing the range by this rough route, ever penetrate beyond the forks of the creek where Pete's cabin stands. And few of these pass his door without alighting. Whether the subject in hand is trout or cattle, horse-thieves or whisky-stills, Pete's countenance and advice is almost indispensable. For our friend is not only an exceedingly smart man in his way, but an original and a character of the most pronounced description. What is more he is known as a "'sponsible mount'n

a unique departure from ordinary rules and a much greater exception even than a responsible Ethiopian. Pete has never been suspected of stealing a steer or setting fire to a barn. When he has taken a contract from some lowland farmer for roofing-shingles, or from the miller for barrel-staves, he has been frequently No. 356.-VOL. LX.

known to carry out his agreement within the appointed time. People have even been known to pay him money on account before the completion of contracts, which with an ordinary mountaineer would be a most fatuous proceeding. Old Squire Tucker, the big man of the country below the mountains and once Member of Congress, used in former days moreover to ask Pete down to play the banjo and tell" bar stories" to the fine folks from Washington staying in his house. For there was no one on the mountain, nor a negro below it, could "pick a banjer" like Pete. Many a night after assisting at one of those mountain suppers that nothing but lusty youth still further hardened by long days on the rocky streams or in the saddle could have survived, have I sat and smoked while Pete twanged at his banjo and crooned out his quaint medley of negro airs and Baptist hymns. Strange performances they used to be, with for audience a group of wild mountain men, drawn together by the rare news of a stranger's arrival, standing in the flickering firelight, and beating time with their often shoeless feet upon the rough boarded floor; and outside the chorus of the frogs and crickets, the intermittent cry of the screech-owl and the cat-bird, the roar and the gleam of the white water, and the flashing of the fire-flies against the black gloom of the night and the forest.

The popular notion in Virginia of the mountaineer, a notion founded more or less upon fact, is that of an attenuated, neutral-tinted expressionless spectre. It is a favourite local pleasantry that the Southern Highlander has, through isolation, ignorance and apathy, so lost the human form divine, as to be indistinguishable at any distance in the woods from a cedar-stump or a fence-rail stuck upon end. Pete at any rate represented a very different variety. He was short and thick, with huge long arms. Everything that was to be seen of him, except his eyes, was covered with

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black shaggy hair. If a human being could be like a bear, Pete was that man; while, curiously enough, if all the real bears on the mountain could have been polled upon the subject, they would most certainly have agreed that Pete was their wiliest and deadliest foe. Pete was well-to-do. He had a young horse of his own, whereas most of the folks higher up the creek had to be content with a share in an old one. His house outside, as I have said, was a superior one. Inside you would have said it was absolutely luxurious, if you had begun to pay calls at the top of the mountain instead of coming up from the country below. The long Kentucky rifle that had slain many a bear, and underneath it the banjo were ranged above the chimneypiece in the living-room. In this apartment, too, was the family bedstead, resplendent with frilled pillow-cases and a patchwork quilt. There was an oak dresser which contrasted oddly with the smoke-blacked logs of the walls, and which Pete used to declare his great-grandfather had brought from "out thar"-a phrase expressing the mountaineer's very hazy notion of the mother country. Pods of red pepper and twists of home-grown tobacco hung from the rafters, while the decorative tastes of the family were displayed in a pedlar's coloured print of Washington on the verge apparently of an apoplectic fit, and a somewhat realistic representation of Lazarus emerging from the tomb. Pete also had a guest-chamber, where weary anglers and an occasional benighted traveller might dispose their tired limbs on straw mattresses of adamantine texture, and resign themselves to tortures from unseen enemies over which memory entreats us to draw the veil.

For land, there were the two acres of clover and struggling apple-trees, and a clearing of twenty acres on the slope of the mountain above. In the latter Pete had grown crop after crop in succession, and declared that the shrinking yield was the result of the

wickedness of the times generally. Mrs. Pete, however, insisted it was a sign of the approaching end of the world and that carnival of flame and torture the anticipation of which so fascinates the mind of the illiterate Calvinist. Pete moreover had a cow and a heifer, and several thousand roofing-shingles and barrel-staves cut in the woods, and some hogs running wild on the mountain, that at this season of the year could almost have wormed themselves underneath his front door.

Pete had seen a lot of life for a mountaineer, for he had been through the war. He was the only man probably on the mountain that felt the least enthusiasm for the Southern cause, and had been more than once detailed with a sergeant's guard to hunt up deserters with which the gorges of the Blue Ridge swarmed. Pete knew every cave in the mountains and every trail. He still recounts with great gusto the exciting "stalks" his truant neighbours used to give him in those stormy days. Many a rifle-shot they exchanged is joked over between them as they huddle over the winter fire, as little influenced for good or evil by that great strife as if they were living in the Sandwich Islands.

Mrs. Pete is a typical mountain woman, gaunt of figure, and with a skin like dried parchment stretched over her projecting bones. If there is little of animation in her appearance, there is less in her manner, and her life is a dreary one indeed. A mixture of superstition and "mountain methodism" seems to dominate her existence. She will sit for hours before the fire in the broken rockingchair, crooning out disconnected lamentations, after some such wise as this "The Lord is good! The Lord is mighty good! We're too sinful, too bad to live! Even this yer mountain's too good for sich as us!" Poor woman, very little attraction there has been for her to wander off along the broad and easy road. Her greatest

thorn is the wickedness of Pete, who has never even "professed". That Pete is by far the most honest and virtuous man in the mountain will, from her peculiar religious standpoint, amount to nothing in the absence of the superstitious hysteria that she regards as salvation.

Following the winding of the narrow valley, sometimes clinging to the wooded hillside, sometimes descending to the level of the stream, toils upwards the rugged, stony track that is the highway of the mountaineer. Little clusters of cabins break at long intervals the rich and varied foliage of the forest. Rude houses enough for the second or third or even the fifth and sixth generation of Anglo-Saxons in the land of phenomenal progress. The roofs are of riven white oak-boards, curled and twisted by the action of the sun and weather; the walls are of rough, unbarked logs, enclosing a single room; the chimneys are of sticks and mud. Round the house there is a small garden-patch fenced in with chestnut-rails, where a few common vegetables, such as peas and onions,. testify to the richness of the loose black mountain soil. To each house there is probably a cow wandering in the woods, making in summer a tolerable living on the bushes and weeds, but passing every winter through a critical period of want and weakness, when the slender supply of corn-fodder begins to fail. Lean hogs stretch themselves in the sun among the warm rocks, lean as greyhounds, while their only chance of making bacon lies in the still unformed fruit of the oaks and chestnuts that spread their branches above them. The women around the settlement will be more conspicuous at this time of day than the men. Nowhere else in the world have the Anglo-Saxon race produced such unattractive and ungraceful females. The peasant girl of Europe may not be all that poetic fancy sometimes paints her, but she at least has health and comeliness, colour and a cheerful mien. The peasant of the

Southern mountains has health after a fashion, or at least a wiriness and tenacity of life; but she carries no sign of it in her bony figure and drawn colourless face. As for the men in this early summer season, when the rest of rural mankind, both North, South and West, in their very various fashions, are snatching the fleeting hour, they may be in the corn-patch on the mountain above, but are just as likely to be found loafing through the woods in listless Indian fashion, rifle in hand, or wandering by the brooks with their rough rods and tackle. Though trout, squirrels, an occasional turkey, with now and then a portion of a deer or bear in their various seasons are to be obtained, no dependence can be placed on such additions to the larder of the Blue Ridge mountaineer in the annual period of semi-starvation through which he generally passes. Game at that time is scare and wild, and is not too plentiful in these narrow ranges at any period. If these cabins and clearings were in Montana or British Columbia, there would be nothing singular about them; they would be the common-place heralds of advancing civilization. The men and women might bear the outward stamp of poverty, but hope and intelligence would be written on their faces and the crudeness of their surroundings would be but a recognized and honourable phase in their career to prosperity. Here, however, it is all different; the squalor carries no hope with it, and is the outcome of the oldest civilization in the Western world.

And yet the goal of civilization and comparative prosperity through all these years has been within easy sight. There is hardly a bend in the road up the gorge of Rumbling Creek, from which if you turn in your saddle you cannot look down over the tree-tops upon the rolling plain of old Virginia, which means so little to the mountaineer. The very roofs of the plantation-houses, catching the sun ten or fifteen miles away, flash from