As the Southern mountains are not like other mountains, so the mountaineers are not like others. For all their beauty these mountains are treacherous and alien, and the people who must wring a livelihood from the sawmills or from the tiny perpendicular farms high up under the sky come to be wary and secret like their woodlands. The Cumberland mountain mother, by nature sharp and sane, has studied the moods of the mountains and of the animals. Illiterate though she be, she is full of ripe wisdom. Many, superior to the mountain woman in, say, sanitation might learn from sitting on cabin doorsteps that they are most often inferior to her in sanity. Yet, frankly, it is often better to sit on the cabin doorstep than to go inside. The mountain mother struggles bravely against dirt, but if you live in a lonely two-room cabin, if you are the sole caretaker of six children under ten, and two cows and a large stony garden, and must help in the cornfield besides, you are excusable if in the end you "quit struggling." The mountain mother does not make herself and her husband and her children slaves to the housekeeping arts. A mountain woman dips snuff--surreptitiously if she is young, frankly if she is old. We settle down on the doorstep probably on straight chairs with seats of cornhusks twisted into a rope and then interwoven. There is a sound to which the mountains have accustomed me--the sharp jolting thud when a mother, if she possesses neither cradle nor rocker, puts her baby to sleep by jerking forward and backward on two legs of a straight chair. There is usually some two-year-old lying fast asleep on the bed just inside the door; or on the porch floor, plump and brown as a bun and studded with flies thick as currants. Mountain children are as vigorous as baby oaks until they reach their teens, and then over-work begins to tell on growing bodies. A reedy boy of thirteen, just beginning to stretch to the length of spine and limb that characterises the mountaineer, often gets a stoop that he never afterward conquers. In the more remote lumber districts I have seen boys of ten and twelve work all day loading cars. There too, slim mountain girls of twelve and fourteen stand all day in the icy spray of the flume to stack bark on the cars. Here where isolation makes people fiercely individualistic public opinion is as slow to deny a man's right to marry at the age he wishes as it is to deny his right to turn his corn into whisky. At the age when boys and girls first awake to the fact of sex they marry and the parents, although regretfully, let them. The unmarried mother is most rare. A boy of sixteen sets himself to all the duties of fatherhood. A fourteen-year-old mother, with an ageless wisdom, enters without faltering on her future of a dozen children.