What has been done in Boone County, N. C., is likely to be done in most of the other mountains sooner or later; the coal and the timber draw the railroad, establish the village, make possible the school and start the community upward; but the mountaineers are slow to move, and the boarding schools, established partly by Northerners, are a godsend to the people. When in one such school mustering a hundred and fifty boys one hundred and thirty "guns" (that is, pistols) are turned over to the principal upon request, it is clear that the mountaineers need a new standard of personal relations. As you ride through parts of Kentucky, people point out to you where Bill Adams lay in wait to kill Sam Skinner last fall; or the house of the man who has killed two men and never got a scratch yet. There is good in these mountain people, there is hope, there is potentiality of business man and college president. Take, for example, the poor mountain boy who, on a trip across the mountains with a fellow Kentuckian, seems to be reading something when he thinks he is not observed, and on closer inquiry reluctantly admits that it is a volume of poetry which some one had left at the house. "Hit's Robert Burns's poems; I like them because it seems to me they are written for people like us. Do you know who I like best in those poems? It is that 'Highland Mary.'" The reason for hope in the future of the Mountain Whites is that they are going through a process which has been shared at one time or another by all the country east of the Rocky Mountains. The Southern mountaineers are the remnant of the many communities of frontiersmen who cleared the forests, fought the Indians, built the first homes, and lived in a primitive fashion. Much of the mountains is still in the colonial condition, but railroads, schools, and cities are powerful civilizing agents, and a people of so much native vigor may be expected in course of no long time to take their place alongside their brethren of the lowlands. The more prosperous South is too little interested in these people, and is doing little direct civilizing work among them, in many districts leaving that task to be performed by schools founded by Northerners. But there are some good state schools among them, as, for instance, that at Boonesboro', N. C.; and numerous small colleges mostly founded before the Civil War.