Except the squatter on the tract of land, which Dr. Hunter and myself had secured the winter of our visit, the nearest settler lived five miles distant! The Cincinnati-Southern Railroad, now the Queen & Crescent route, had not crossed the meandering Kentucky River and the country was practically inaccessible. Men and women grew up without ever hearing of a church, a school, a book, a newspaper, a preacher, a doctor, a wheeled vehicle or a lucifer-match! The heathen of Bariaboola-Gha were as well informed concerning God and a future state. They herded in miserable cabins, lived on “corn-dodgers and sow-belly,” drank home-made whiskey and never wandered ten miles from their own fireside. Of the great outside world, of moral obligations, of religious conviction and of current events they were profoundly ignorant. Think of people fifty, sixty, seventy years old, born and reared in the United States, who never saw a loaf of wheat-bread, a wagon, a cart or a baby-carriage, to say nothing of a plum-pudding, railway-coach, a trolley-car or a tandem-bicycle! It seems incredible, in this advanced age and bang-up nation, that such conditions should be possible, yet they existed in Southeastern Kentucky. And the American eagle flaps his wings, while Americans boast of their culture and send barrels of cold cash to buy flannel-shirts for perspiring Hottentots and goody-goody tracts for jolly cannibals! “Consistency’s a jewel.” Small need of barbed-wire fences to shut out the cattle and chickens of neighbors five miles apart! Their children did not quarrel and sulk and yell “You can’t play in our yard!” Our host, who took us over the property and told us all he knew about it, had not seen a strange face for twenty-nine weary months! Then the neighbor five miles off had come in the vain search of a cruse of oil from the old well to rub on an afflicted hog! Three years had rolled by since his last expedition to the cross-roads, fourteen miles away, to trade “coon-skins” for jeans and groceries. Could isolation be more complete? Was Alexander Selkirk less blessed with companionship on his secluded island? Had Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, “on a wide, wide sea,” greater cause for an attack of the blues? The steel-track and the iron-horse are prime civilizers and eighteen years have wrought a wondrous change in the section bordering upon the Cumberland Mountains. The schoolmaster has come in with the railroad and improvement is the prevailing order. Farmers have turned their forests into cultivated fields and bought the latest implements. Their boys read the papers, yearn for the city, smoke cigarettes, dabble in politics and dream of unbounded wealth. The girls, no longer content with homespun frocks and sunbonnets, dress in silk and velvet, wear stylish hats, devour French novels, sport high-heeled shoes and balloon-sleeves, play Beethoven and Chopin, waltz divinely and are altogether lovable!