The most unfavorable mountain conditions are fairly illustrated by eastern Kentucky, a veritable back country. Along the roads the traveler passes a number of one-room houses, without glass windows, and is told many tales of the irregular or no-family life of the people. Perhaps along a creek he chances on a traditional Mountain White family, such as Porte Crayon drew fifty years ago, when these people were first described as a curiosity. Below a dirty and ill-favored house, down under the bank on the shingle near the river, sits a family of five people, all ill-clothed and unclean; a blear-eyed old woman, a younger woman with a mass of tangled red hair hanging about her shoulders, indubitably suckling a baby; a little girl with the same auburn evidence of Scotch ancestry; a boy, and a younger child, all gathered about a fire made among some bricks, surrounding a couple of iron saucepans, in which is a dirty mixture looking like mud, but probably warmed-up sorghum syrup, which, with a few pieces of corn pone, makes their breakfast. A counterbalance to the squalor is the plump and pretty girls that appear all along the way, with the usual mountain headdress of the sunbonnet, perched at a killing angle. Such people have their own peculiarities of speech like the mountain woman's characterization of a forlorn country-seat: "Warn't hit the nighest ter nowhar uv ary place ever you's at?" The miserable family described above are a fair type of what a writer on the subject calls the "submerged tenth among the mountaineers"; but they belong to the lowest type, to which those who know them best give no favorable character; they live in the remotest parts of the mountains, in the rudest cabins, with the smallest provision of accumulated food. Most of them are illiterate and more than correspondingly ignorant. Some of them had Indian ancestors and a few bear evidences of negro blood. The so-called "mountain-boomer," says an observer, "has little self-respect and no self-reliance.... So long as his corn pile lasts the 'cracker' lives in contentment, feasting on a sort of hoe cake made of grated corn meal mixed with salt and water and baked before the hot coals, with addition of what game the forest furnishes him when he can get up the energy to go out and shoot or trap it.... The irregularities of their moral lives cause them no sense of shame.... But, notwithstanding these low moral conceptions, they are of an intense religious excitability.... They license and ordain their own preachers, who are no more intelligent than they are themselves, but who are distinguished by special ability in getting people 'shouting happy,' or in 'shaking the sinner over the smoking fires of hell until he gets religion.'" They are all users of tobacco--men, women, and children. They smoke and chew and "dip snuff."... Bathing is unknown among them.... When a garment is put on once it is there to stay until it falls to pieces. The washtub is practically as