The railroad now building between Callaway, Ky., and Beattieville, Ky., will penetrate the wildest and remotest fastnesses of the Appalachian Highlands and open up to development the vast stores of coal, iron, and other minerals now buried in their recesses; but it will also destroy much of the glamour of romance and fable that has so long hung over and been associated with it. In the past the mountain region of Kentucky has been a world unto itself, preserving, almost intact, the manners, customs, and characteristics of the early settlers of almost two centuries ago. Feuds have been handed down from father to son for three generations, after the manner of the Scotch Highlanders, and many strange superstitions, among others a belief in haunts, wizards, witches, and warlocks still hold in the bosoms of many of the mountain dwellers. Wise men, seers, and hermits still hold forth among the Pine Mountains, and the greatest among these--and regarded by many as being able to peer into the beyond and read the future as an open book--is “Old Norrie Parysons,” the wise man of Plinlimon’s Heights, at the base of which the village of Calloway is located. His dwelling place is a large cave, fashioned by the hand of Nature, but it resembles not the cell of an anchorite, for it is fitted up comfortably, almost luxuriously. Old Norrie is a man of remarkable and striking appearance. He is the product of the melting pot into which has been cast the blood of the Cymbrian harper, the Highland seer, and the Aztec priest; for his mother, an Indian princess, could trace her lineage back to the days of the Montezumas, when her ancestors, high priests of an ancient faith, possessed secular and ecclesiastical, temporal and sacerdotal authority over unnumbered millions. His father traced his ancestry back to Cadwallon, the last and greatest of the Cymbrian, or Welsh bards, whose only daughter married a celebrated Scotch warlock. The hermit, seer, prophet, or whatever we may choose to call him, is no ignorant and uncultured boor. He is now old, almost beyond the memory of years, and his once raven hair is white as the driven snow, but his form is still erect, his step free, neither is his natural strength abated. His eyes are somewhat dimmed and bleared from much watching over midnight furnaces, and have the weird, pathetic look seen only in eyes that have gazed into mysteries unlawful for men to know; but still in their slumbrous depths can be discovered flashes of latent flame that, at times, seems to pierce into the most secret thoughts of the beholder.