But as the writer has stated, it is the human, not the industrial, problem to be solved by this development that possessed for him the main interest. One seems to see in the perforation and breaking up of Cumberland Mountain an event as decisive of the destiny of Kentucky as though the vast wall had fallen, destroying the isolation of the State, bringing into it the new, and letting the old be scattered until it is lost. But while there is no space here to deal with those changes that are rapidly passing over Kentucky life and obliterating old manners and customs, old types of character and ideals of life, old virtues and graces as well as old vices and horrors--there is a special topic too closely connected with the foregoing facts not to be considered: the effect of this development upon the Kentucky mountaineers. The buying up of the mountain lands has unsettled a large part of these people. Already there has been formed among them a class of tenants paying rent and living in their old homes. But in the main there are three movements among them. Some desert the mountains altogether, and descend to the Blue-grass Region with a passion for farming. On county-court days in blue-grass towns it has been possible of late to notice this peculiar type mingling in the market-places with the traditional type of blue-grass farmer. There is thus going on, especially along the border counties, a quiet interfusion of the two human elements of the Kentucky highlander and the Kentucky lowlander, so long distinct in blood, physique, history, and ideas of life. To less extent, the mountaineers go farther west, beginning life again beyond the Mississippi. A second general tendency among them is to be absorbed by the civilization that is springing up in the mountains. They flock to these towns, keep store, are shrewd and active speculators in real estate, and successful developers of small capital. The first business house put up in the new Pineville was built by a mountaineer. But the third, and, as far as can be learned, the most general movement among them is to retire at the approach of civilization to remoter regions of the mountains, where they may live without criticism or observation their hereditary, squalid, unambitious, stationary life. But to these retreats they must in time be followed, therefrom dislodged, and again set going. Thus a whole race of people are being scattered, absorbed, civilized. You may go far before you will find a fact so full of consequences to the future of the State. Within a few years the commonwealth of Kentucky will be a hundred years old. All in all, it would seem that with the close of its first century the old Kentucky passes away; and that the second century will bring in a new Kentucky--new in many ways, but new most of all on account of the civilization of the Cumberland. THE END FLUTE AND VIOLIN,