IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS BY CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge COPYRIGHT, 1884, BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY MARY N. MURFREE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED CONTENTS. DRIFTING DOWN LOST CREEK A-PLAYIN' OF OLD SLEDGE AT THE SETTLEMINT THE STAR IN THE VALLEY ELECTIONEERIN' ON BIG INJUN MOUNTING THE ROMANCE OF SUNRISE ROCK THE DANCIN' PARTY AT HARRISON'S COVE OVER ON THE T'OTHER MOUNTING THE "HARNT" THAT WALKS CHILHOWEE IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS. DRIFTING DOWN LOST CREEK. I. High above Lost Creek Valley towers a wilderness of pine. So dense is this growth that it masks the mountain whence it springs. Even when the Cumberland spurs, to the east, are gaunt and bare in the wintry wind, their deciduous forests denuded, their crags unveiled and grimly beetling, Pine Mountain remains a sombre, changeless mystery; its clifty heights are hidden, its chasms and abysses lurk unseen. Whether the skies are blue, or gray, the dark, austere line of its summit limits the horizon. It stands against the west like a barrier. It seemed to Cynthia Ware that nothing which went beyond this barrier ever came back again. One by one the days passed over it, and in splendid apotheosis, in purple and crimson and gold, they were received into the heavens, and returned no more. She beheld love go hence, and many a hope. Even Lost Creek itself, meandering for miles between the ranges, suddenly sinks into the earth, tunnels an unknown channel beneath the mountain, and is never seen again. She often watched the floating leaves, a nettle here and there, the broken wing of a moth, and wondered whither these trifles were borne, on the elegiac current. She came to fancy that her life was like them, worthless in itself and without a mission; drifting down Lost Creek, to vanish vaguely in the mountains. Yet her life had not always been thus destitute of pleasure and purpose. There was a time--and she remembered it well--when she found no analogies in Lost Creek. Then she saw only a stream gayly dandering down the valley, with the laurel and the pawpaw close in to its banks, and the kildeer's nest in the sand.