Mink, trotting along the red clay road, came suddenly upon the banks of the Scolacutta River, riotous with the late floods, fringed with the papaw and the ivy bush. Beyond its steely glint he could see the sun-flooded summit of Chilhowee, a bronze green, above the intermediate ranges: behind him was the Great Smoky, all unfamiliar viewed from an unaccustomed standpoint, massive, solemn, of dusky hue; white and amber clouds were slowly settling on the bald. There had been a shower among the mountains, and a great rainbow, showing now only green and rose and yellow, threw a splendid slant of translucent color on the purple slope. In such an environment the little rickety wooden mill--with its dilapidated leaking race, with its motionless wheel moss-grown, with its tottering supports throbbing in the rush of the water which rose around them, with a loitering dozen or more mountaineers about the door--might seem a feeble expression of humanity. To Mink the scene was the acme of excitement and interest. A picture of summer it is for the most part painted lavishly with adjectives, and presented with impressionistic rather than realistic effect. Every detail is intensified. The mountains of eastern Tennessee are only moderate ridges, yet in the Craddock tales they take on the proportions of the Canadian Rockies or the Alps. The peak that dominates _In the Clouds_ seems to soar like a Mont Blanc: In the semblance of the cumulus-cloud from which it takes its name, charged with the portent of the storm, the massive peak of Thunderhead towers preëminent among the summits of the Great Smoky Mountains, unique, impressive, most subtly significant. What strange attraction of the earth laid hold on this vagrant cloud-form? What unexplained permanence of destiny solidified it and fixed it forever in the foundations of the range? Kindred thunderheads of the air lift above the horizon, lure, loiter, lean on its shoulder with similitudes and contrasts. Then with all the buoyant liberties of cloudage they rise--rise!... Sometimes it was purple against the azure heavens; or gray and sharp of outline on faint green spaces of the sky; or misty, immaterial, beset with clouds, as if the clans had gathered to claim the changeling. Always the scenery dominates the book. It is significant that all of her early titles have in them the name of a locality,--the setting is the chief thing: Lost Creek, Big Injun Mounting, Harrison's Cove, Chilhowee, the Great Smoky Mountains, Broomsedge Cove, Keedon Bluffs. In stories like _The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain_ the background becomes supreme: the human element seems to have been added afterwards by a sort of necessity; the central character is the great witch-face on the mountain.