It begins with two boys and a girl, generically divided into brother and sister and their companion, living on the divide-range of mountains between Kentucky and Tennessee. The people raised hogs, which were fattened on the mast of the range, while a few weeks' feeding on corn and slops in the fall gave the meat the desired firmness and flavor. They cultivated a few acres of corn, tobacco and potatoes, and had a kitchen-garden for "short sass" and "long sass"--leguminous and tuberous plants. Apples are called "sour sass." The chief local currency was red-fox scalps, for which the State of Kentucky paid a reward: the people did not think of raising such vermin for the peltry, as the shrewder speculator of a New England State did. They sold venison and bear-meat at five cents a pound to the lame trader at Jimtown, who wagoned it as far as Columbia, Kentucky, and sold it for seventy-five cents. They went to the log church in the woods on Sundays, and believed that Christ was God in the flesh, with other old doctrines now rapidly becoming heretical in the enlightened churches of the East. Living contentedly in this simple way, neither rich nor poor, the lads grew up, nutting, fishing, hunting together, and the companion naturally looked forward to the day when he would sell enough peltry and meat to buy a huge watch like a silver biscuit, such as the schoolmaster wore, make a clearing and cabin in the wild hills, and buy his one suit of store clothes, in which to wed the pretty sister of his friend. Then came the war. Although it divided the two friends, the old kindness kept their difference from flaming forth in the vendetta fashion peculiar to the region. It was a great deal that these two young fellows did not believe that military morality required them to shoot each other on sight. Yet, on reconsideration, I will not be so sure of their opinion on this point. Perhaps they thought that, morally and patriotically, they ought to do this, and were conscious of weakness and failure of duty in omitting to do it. Perhaps the old good-will survived for the girl's sake; and if so, I do not think the Union was the worse preserved on that account. The young lover went into the ranks of Wolford's regiment of loyal mountaineers, and rose--slowly at first, more rapidly as his square sense and upright character became known.