Within a few short hours I had left behind Old Virginia and its reminders of colonial days and crossed into the Mountain State. "There's plenty of beauty and culture in Old Virginia, I'm not denying that--" Bruce Crawford looked over his spectacles at his inquisitive visitor--"but there's just as much on this side of the Blue Ridge. We've got as many wonders under the earth as above it. And"--he turned now in his swivel chair in his quarters in the Capital to look far up the Kanawha River--among the many duties of this Fayette County man is that of letting the world know about his state--"I'm not forgetting Boone roved these parts. Trapped and hunted right here on the Kanawha. But what I started to talk about was not the hills, the rivers, and the caves, but the people." He spoke slowly, deliberately, this sturdy, well-groomed hillsman. Like Sergeant York of the Tennessee Mountains Bruce Crawford can, if need be, drop easily back into the dialect of his people. And he is an accomplished writer. "I don't care enough about it to follow the profession of writing," he said, and fire glowed in his gray eyes. "But as old Uncle Dyke Garrett used to say, 'I takened all I could a while back from furriners' so I cut loose and wrote my notions about it and it was published in the _West Virginia Review_. Take it along with you on your travels through the Mountain State and see if I've come near hitting center." It seems to me he came mighty near hitting center and with Bruce Crawford's permission, here are his sentiments: "In recent weeks two ignorant jibes were flung at the State of West Virginia, one by a Southern editor and the other by a Northern cartoonist. "The editor, a Virginian, moaned that rude mountaineers had routed Democrats of the 'old Southern type' from the Capital on the Kanawha and that the Lost Cause was lost all over again. He was still sad because Senator Matthew M. Neely had been elected Governor on a platform to restore democracy to the Democratic Party, and government to the governed, in West Virginia. "The cartoonist represented us by a stock hill-billy character with bushy beard and rifle in hand, gunning for someone around the mountains. "Both editor and cartoonist have their heads in the sands of the past.