He had not come into contact yet with the humanity in those hills. The log cabins he had seen from the train--clinging to the hillsides, nestling in little coves amid apple-trees, or close to the banks of rushing little creeks--had struck him as most picturesque and charming, and an occasional old mill, with its big water-wheel, boxed-in, grass-hung mill-race half hidden by weeping willows, had given him sheer delight; but now he was meeting the people in the road and could see them close at hand in doorway and porches of the wretched little houses that he passed. How mean, meagre, narrow, and poverty-stricken must be their lives! At one cabin he had to stop for midday dinner, for the word "lunch," he found, was unknown. A slatternly woman with scraggling black hair, and with three dirty children clinging to her dirty apron, "reckoned she mought git him a bite," and disappeared. Flies swarmed over him when he sat in the porch. The rancid smell of bedding struck his sensitive nostrils from within. He heard the loud squawking of a chicken cease suddenly, and his hunger-gnawed stomach almost turned when he suddenly realized just what it meant. When called within, it was dirt and flies, flies and dirt, everywhere. He sat in a chair with a smooth-worn cane bottom so low that his chin was just above the table. The table-cover was of greasy oilcloth. His tumbler was cloudy, unclean, and the milk was thin and sour. Thick slices of fat bacon swam in a dish of grease, blood was perceptible in the joints of the freshly killed, half-cooked chicken, and the flies swarmed. As he rode away he began to get a glimmer of light. Perhaps Juno--his Juno--had once lived like that; perhaps her people did yet. There was another mountain to climb, and a stranger who was going his way offered to act as guide. The stranger was a Kentuckian, he said, from the Bluegrass region, and he was buying timber through the hills. He volunteered this, but the New England man made no self-revealment. Instead he burst out: "_How_ do these people live this way?" "They have to--they're pretty poor." "They don't have to keep--dirty." "They've got used to it, and so would you if your folks had been living out in this wilderness for a hundred years." From a yard that they passed, a boy with a vacant face and retreating forehead dropped his axe to stare at them. "That's the second one I've seen," said the professor. "Yes, idiots are not unusual in these mountains--inbreeding!" "Do they still have moonshining and feuds and all that yet?" "Plenty of moonshining. The feuds are all over practically, though I did hear that the big feud over the mountain was likely to be stirred up again--the old Camp and Adkin feud." A question came faintly from behind: "Do you know any of the Camps?" "Used to know old Red King Camp, the leader. He's in the penitentiary now for killing a man. What's the matter?" He turned in his saddle, but the New Englander had recovered himself.