White's cabin was better than the average Sand-Mountain house, but its surroundings were not so inviting as those where considerable farms, with orchards and garden plats, gave an air of frugal thrift, almost of comfort to the scene, at some points in the lower valleys. It was built of pine logs, split into halves, the flat side turned in, and the apertures between covered with long clap-boards of pine, rove with the grain, and smoothed with a drawing-knife. The chimneys, which were spacious, consisted of pens of split sticks, built from the ground to a little above the roof, and heavily daubed with red clay. An arid little clearing whose stumpy, rain-washed fields lay as if on edge, leaning against the mountain-side, showed that a light crop of tobacco or a doubtful yield of maize "nubbins" would be the best return that labor might hope for from the soilless clay and the dry, lifeless monotony of the mountain summers. This clearing was all on one side of the cabin, reaching down toward the little valley, whilst on the other three sides the forest was unbroken, saving that, further up the mountain, wind and fire had done their work for ages. The fences about the place were old and neglected, grown over by vines and shrubs of various kinds, and the little gate in front, made of wattled boards, hung askew on rude hinges of hickory withes. Just outside of this gate, between it and the road, was a small space which for many years, ever since the cabin was built, in fact, had been used for piling up, cutting and splitting the wood and pine knots used by the household, and upon which a moldy mass of chips, bark and woody fragments had slowly accumulated. All the native trees near the cabin had long ago been felled, and a few gnarled peach trees now grew in their stead. Standing on the rotten door-sill and looking out across the lower valley, one could have a fine view, over ill-shaped farm-plats and variegated woods, of the broken masses of mountains, near and far, with their beetling cliffs, their clustered foot-hills and their bare stony peaks, all over-canopied with a serene blue sky. But the scene was not one to inspire the beholder with any broad ideas of nature or of human life. It was a dry, cramped, desolate landscape, even in the first fresh colors of spring, when the tassels were on the trees and the wild flowers fairly carpeted the ground, for it lacked fertility, suggestion, promise.