The simplicity of these dwellers in the wilderness was equaled only by their apathy to the world beyond and around them. Parents loved their children and husbands loved their wives in a quiet, unobtrusive fashion. “She wuz a hard-workin’ woman,” moaned a middle-aged widower in Fentress county, telling me of his deceased spouse, “an’ she allers wore a frock five year, an’ she bed ’leven chil’ren, an’ she died right in corn-shuckin’!” He was not stony-hearted, but twenty-five years of married companionship meant to him just so many days’ work, so many cheap frocks, child-bearing, corn-cake and bacon always ready on time. Among these people woman was a drudge, who knew nothing of the higher relations of life. Children were huddled into the hills to track game, to follow the plough or to drop corn over many a weary acre. Reading and writing were unknown accomplishments. Jackson, “the great tradition of the uninformed American mind,” and Lincoln, whose name the tumult of a mighty struggle had rendered familiar, were the only Presidents they had ever heard of. “Where ignorance is bliss ’tis folly to be wise” may be a sound poetical sentiment, but it was decidedly overdone in South-eastern Kentucky and North-eastern Tennessee so recently as the year of the Philadelphia Centennial. Opposite the Hovey and Carter wells in Clinton county lives a portly farmer who “is a good man and weighs two-hundred-and-fifty pounds.” He is known far and wide as “Uncle John” and his wife, a pleasant-faced little matron, is affectionately called “Aunt Rachel.” A log-church a mile from “Uncle John’s” is situated on a pretty hill. There the young folks are married, the children are baptized and the dead are buried. The “June meetin’,” when services are held for a week, is the grand incident of the year to the people for a score of miles. In December of 1893 Dr. Phillips, of Monticello, drove me to the wells. We stopped at “Uncle John’s.” As we neared the house a dog barked and the hospitable farmer came out to meet us. Behind him walked a man who greeted the Doctor cordially. He glanced at me, recognition was mutual and we clasped hands warmly. He was Alfred Murray, formerly connected with the Pennsylvania-Consolidated Land-and-Petroleum-Company in Butler and at Bradford. Fourteen years had glided away since we met and there were many questions to ask and answer. He had been in the neighborhood a twelvemonth, keeping tab on oil movements and indications, hoping, longing and praying for the speedy advent of the petroleum-millenium. We pumped the Hovey Well one hour, rambled over the hills and talked until midnight about persons and things in Pennsylvania. Meeting in so dreary a place, under such circumstances, was as thorough a surprise as Stanley’s discovery of Livingstone in Darkest Africa. During our conversation regarding the roughest portion of the county, bleak, sterile and altogether repellant, selected by a hermit as his lonely