BOOKS BY “Charles Egbert Craddock.” (MARY N. MURFREE.) IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS. Short Stories. 16mo, $1.25. DOWN THE RAVINE. A Story for Young People. Illustrated. 16mo, $1.00. THE PROPHET OF THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25. IN THE CLOUDS. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. BOSTON AND NEW YORK. IN THE CLOUDS BY CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK, AUTHOR OF “IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS,” “DOWN THE RAVINE,” “THE PROPHET OF THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS,” ETC. [Illustration] BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1887 Copyright, 1886, BY MARY N. MURFREE. _All rights reserved._ _The Riverside Press, Cambridge_: Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. IN THE CLOUDS. I. 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! Alas! the earth clasps its knees; the mountains twine their arms about it; hoarded ores of specious values weigh it down. It cannot soar! Only the cumbrous image of an ethereal thing! Only the ineffective wish vainly fashioned like the winged aspiration! It may have said naught of this to Ben Doaks, but it exerted strenuous fascinations on the sense alert to them. Always he turned his eyes toward Thunderhead, as he came and went among his cattle on the neighboring heights of Piomingo Bald, a few miles distant to the northeast. Often he left the herder’s cabin in the woods below, and sat for hours on a rock on the summit, smoking his pipe and idly watching the varying aspects of the great peak. 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.