In The Tennessee Mountains

1N THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS - 1886 - CONTENTS. LlCI PAOB DRIFTINDGO WNL OST C REEE . . . . . . . . . 1 A-PLAYIN O F OLD SLEDGE AT THE SETTLEMIN . T, 80 OVER O N THE TOTHEMR OUNTING . . . . . . . 247 IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS. - DRIFTING DOWN LOST CREEK - HIGH above Lost Creek Valley towers a wilderness of pine. So denseis this growth that it masks the mount, ain whence it springs. Even when the Cumberland spurs, to the east, are gaunt and bare in the wintry mind, their deciduous forests denuded, their crags unveiled and grimly beetling, Pine Mountain remains a sombre, changeless mystery its clif ty heights are hidden, its chasms and abysses lurk unseen. Whether the skies are blue, or gray, the dark, austere line of its summit limits the horizon. It stands against the west like a barrier. It seemed to Cynthia Ware that nothing which went beyond this barrier ever came back again. One by one the days passed over it, and in splendid apotheosis, in purple and crimson and gold, they mere received into the heavens, and retnrned no more. She beheld love go hence, and many a hope. Even Lost Creek itself, meandering for miles between the ranges, suddenly sinks into the earth, tunnels an unknown channel beneath the mountain, and is never seen again. She often watched the floating leaves, a nettle here and there, the broken wing of a moth, a idw ondered whither these trifles were borne, on the elegiac current. She came to fancy that her life was like them, worthless in itself and without a mission drifting down Lost Creek, to vanish vaguely in the nlountains. Yet her life had not always bee11 thus destitute of pleasure and purpose. There was a time - and she remembered it well w h e n she found noanalogies in Lost Creek. Then she saw only a stream gayly dandering down the valley, with the laurel and the pawpaw close in to its banks, and the kildeers nest in the sand. Before it takes that desperate plunge into the unexplored caverns of the mountain, Lost Creek lends its aid to divers jobs of very prosaic work. Further up the valley it turns a mill-wheel, and on Mondays it is wont to assist in the family mash. A fire of pine-knots, kindled beside it on a flat rock, would twine long, lucent white flames about the huge kettle in which the clothes were boiled. Through the steam the distant landscape flickered, ethereal, dream-like .The garments, laid across a bench and beaten white with a wooden paddle, would flutter hilariously in the mind. Deep in some willowy tangle the water-thrush might sing. - Ever and anon from the heights above vibrated the clink ing of a hand-hammer and the clanking of a sledge. This iterative sound used to pulse like a lyric in Cynthias heart. But her mother, one day, took up her testimony against it. I do declar, it sets me plumb catawampus ter hev ter listen ter them blacksmiths, up yander ter thar shop, at thar everlastin chinkchank an chink-chank, considerin the tales I liearn bout em, when I war down ter the qoiltin at Mrias house in the Cove. She paused to prod the boiling clothes with a long stick. She wits a tall woman, fifty years of age, perhaps, but seeming much older. So gaunt she was, so toothless, haggard, and disheveled, that but for her lazy step and languid interest she might have suggested one of Macbeths witches, as she hovered about the great cauldron. They lomed down yander ter Mrias house ez this hyar Evsnder Price hev kem ter be theheadinest, no count critter in the kentry I They lomed ez he hev been a-foolin round Pete Blenkinss forge, a-morkin fur him ez a striker, till he thinks hisself ez good a - black...