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BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Always enwrapped in the illusory mists, always touching the evasiveclouds, the peaks of the Great Smoky Mountains are like some barrenideal, that has bartered for the vague isolations of a higher atmospherethe material values of the warm world below. Upon those mighty andmajestic domes no tree strikes root, no hearth is alight; humanity is analien thing, and utility set at naught. Below, dense forests cover themassive, precipitous slopes of the range, and in the midst of thewilderness a clearing shows, here and there, and the roof of a humblelog-cabin; in the valley, far, far lower still, a red spark at dusk maysuggest a home, nestling in the cove. Grain grows apace in these scantyclearings, for the soil in certain favoured spots is mellow; and theweeds grow, too, and in a wet season the ploughs are fain to be active.They are of the bull-tongue variety, and are sometimes drawn by oxen. Asoften as otherwise they are followed by women.
In the gracious June mornings, when winds are astir and wings are awhirlin the wide spaces of the sunlit air, the work seemed no hardship toDorinda Cayce—least of all one day when another plough ran parallel tothe furrows of her own, and a loud, drawling, intermittent conversationbecame practicable. She paused often, and looked idly about her:sometimes at the distant mountains, blue and misty, against theindefinite horizon; sometimes down at the cool, dense shadows of thewooded valley, so far below the precipice, to which the steep clearingshelved; sometimes at the little log-cabin on the slope above, shelteredby a beetling crag and shadowed by the pines; sometimes still higher atthe great 'bald' of the mountain, and its mingled phantasmagoria ofshifting clouds and flickering sheen and glimmering peak.
'He 'lowed ter me,' she said suddenly, 'ez he hev been gin ter viewstrange sights a many a time in them fogs, an' sech.'
The eyes lifted to the shivering vapours might never have reflectedaught but a tropical sunshine, so warm, so bright, so languorously calmwere they. She turned them presently upon a young man, who wasploughing with a horse close by, and who also came to a meditative haltin the turn-row. He too was of intermittent conversational tendencies,and between them it might be marvelled that so many furrows were alreadyrun. He wore a wide-brimmed brown wool hat, set far back upon his head;a mass of straight yellow hair hung down to the collar of his brownjeans coat. His brown eyes were slow and contemplative. The corn wasknee-high, and hid the great boots drawn over his trousers. As he movedthere sounded the unexpected jingle of spurs. He looked, with thestolid, lack-lustre expression of the mountaineer, at the girl, whocontinued, as she lea