The novel is laid in the Tennessee Mountains in the same region that was to figure a decade later in the stories of Charles Egbert Craddock. The Great Smoky Mountains and Chilhowee Mountain--familiar names now--form the background, but the author puts no individuality into the landscape. It might be Germany. His mountaineers, however, are alive and they are sharply characterized. Gorm Smallin and his brother Cain are among the earliest figures in that vast gallery of realistically portrayed local types that soon was to figure so prominently in American literature. The chapter that records the desertion of Gorm and his arraignment by his brother Cain is worthy of standing with the best work of Charles Egbert Craddock or Octave Thanet. The prison scenes, drawn from the author's own first-hand experience, are documents in the history of the war. On every line is the stamp of reality. Here is a bivouac scene: Cain Smallin sat, stiff backed upon the ground, sternly regarding his packed circle of biscuits in the skillet. "How do they come on, Cain? Most done?"... "Bully! Brownin' a little some of 'em. 'Bout ten minutes yit." At that moment a shell that has buried itself in the ground explodes in the midst of the group, literally burying the party and scattering havoc. Cain Smallin, unhurt, digs himself from the ruins and scrapes the dirt from his face. "Boys," said he, in a broken voice of indignant but mournful inquiry, "have any of ye seed the skillet?" In the words of its preface, the book was a cry, "a faint cry, sent from a region where there are few artists, to happier lands who own many; calling on these last for more sunshine and less night in their art.... There are those even here in the South who still love beautiful things with sincere passion." But necessity was upon the young dreamer. He was without a profession, and he had married a wife. There was no refuge but his father's profession, which always had been the last as well as the first resort of young Southerners. His father's law firm was glad to employ him, though it could offer but meager compensation. No more novels, no more dreams of the scholar's life, of Heidelberg, and poetry. Until 1873 he was busy, like Cable during the same period, with his conveyances and his bills of sale. The ambitious plan of a long poem of medieval France, "The Jacquerie," he kept in his desk, a beautiful dream that often he returned to. He wrote exquisite little songs for it: May the maiden, Violet-laden Out of the violet sea, Comes and hovers Over lovers, Over thee, Marie, and me, Over me and thee.