of the outer world, that when they do get a chance at them they make the most of it. They cannot let you casually pass by on a back road of the Blue Ridge. "In desert places when men meet, they pass not as in busy street." Their inordinate thirst for one's family history and their all-devouring stare may be found trying, yet these are their prerogative, and being universal, it is well to get used to them at once, and submit as gracefully as may be. If you should encounter a man who does not appear to be bursting with a desire to stop and engage you in conversation for the balance of the day, look compassionately on him. He is probably deaf and dumb. If you chance upon another who doesn't stop in his tracks and rivet his eyes on you, from the moment you heave in sight until you are hull-down in the offing, have a care that you don't run over him. He is stone-blind. While it is true that the people in the main, though backward, are by no means unintelligent, yet there is a moiety still with benighted ideas so born and bred in them, that nothing short of the scalpel and the X-rays could root these from their composition. To bask in the irradiance of their society you must visit the farthest recesses of the Ridge. There you will find the school of scientists who hold that this terrestrial planet of ours is flat; and there, the distinguished savant who maintains that the sun revolves round the earth, and who would write a thesis to prove it, if he could but write his name; and there you will make the acquaintance of the eminent astronomer who has convinced himself that the moon will one night go out, if by any contingency the milky way resources for the green cheese supply happen to fail. There also is the chemist of advanced thought and deep research who will sagely remark to you: "It's a quare thing to me, but I've sort o' noticed for a while back that the better the dirt, the better the crop is liable to be right thar." Besides the Professor already mentioned, the other public characters are the Preacher and the Doctor. The preacher is more than likely to be a "hardshell" Baptist, the denomination to which most of the church-going folk adhere. He is commonly just one of the brethren with the furor loquendi strongly developed, and who has studied for himself what rudimentary theology he knows. He holds services once a-month, and for the rest of the time is not much more in evidence than any ordinary layman. In his long rambling pastoral discourses to his flock, the further he can wander the less pabulum he can find them, and the more befogged he can leave them the better they think of him. The old-time doctor, sans college training, sans diploma, sans everything but saddlebags, is still to be found, though hap- quick a body can be took bad. pily he is all but extinct. The Ye look a'most like Aunt qualified younger man has Marthy did when she got almost completely ousted him. down, an' she only lasted three Under the régime of the old days; or, "I've seed you practitioner, a case of sickness have spells o' sickness afore, was hailed by the community but it's ontellin' but ye mought at large as a a great public make a die out of it this time.” function. Whenever it got Such talk as this, coupled with noised abroad that there was the bustle, the banging of the serious illness anywhere about, door, the tread of heavy boots -unless it was something like on the bare floor, and the smallpox, that they were afraid odours of cooking and tobacco, of,-old and young of both could very materially expedite sexes would gird up their a demise. Typhoid and conloins and rally to the spot, to sumption are the most prehelp, to advise, and to have a valent diseases, and the most big time generally. Each dame fatal. Following in the wake on her arrival had to diagnose of a case of typhoid, there is the symptoms afresh, and to sure to be another in the same confer profoundly about them household, till the whole family with the doctor and the other has an attack. To all this the old wife doctors. Doubtless qualified doctor puts a stop, of course. General health on the Ridge is excellent, though for some inscrutable reason it is the fashion of the people never to admit to feeling quite well. Ask the most rudely healthy native you can find how he is, and nine times out of ten the reply will be, "Jest only moderate." some of the old parties were experts in handling certain diseases, but, quot homines tot sententiæ, they all differed more or less in their prescriptions, so the majority of those most nearly in agreement had to rule. A late arrival with plenty assurance and tongue might upset the hegemony, and the course of treatment might suddenly be radically altered. Given a good constitution to start with, reasonably complicated disease, and a full house, a patient could acquire as much clinical experience as in a whole course of walking the hospitals. In addition to his physicians, the sick person had the company of the unprofessional visitors, and the benefit of their morbid hark-from-the-tomb remarks. "Well now, jest to think how Beset with difficulties in the way of travel, and kept with nose always within sniffing distance of the grindstone, the Blue Ridge backwynder does not get much into contact with the world. Hence the "sotfastnes" of his ways and views, and his unconcern of things outside of his beat. His ideas are microscopical. On one of the spurs of the Ridge, from where the view of distant mountain was so magnificent that the eye of the beholder perceived nothing of the foreground or of the middle distance, but passed direct to the background of the picture, embracing the Unaka Range, the Grandfather Mountain, Mitchell's Mountain, and Clingman's Dome, all peaks of altitude that have found for them a place on the American map, the writer asked of an old toll-keeper if he was acquainted with the different heights in view, and if he could point them out by name. "I kin for sure," he replied; "that yonder," indicating a corn patch of rather pronounced perpendicularity in the proscenium right by us, "is the Widdy Sharkey's Knob; and that," pointing to another upright-looking croft, half a mile off, "they call Lige Pruit's Rise." Beyond was terra incognita, all outside of his world and not of his ken. His optic lens came to a focus where his limited mental range ended, and his vision gave out at the toe-joint protuberances of his own mountain - range foothills. Here and there, in the timbered sections, commercial enterprise has reached out and planted down a portable sawmill, and is handling such of the oak, chestnut, poplar, and pine as is fit for ripping into lumber that will bear the expense of the laborious carriage to the nearest shipping point on the railroad. Only the choicest of the timber in the remote nooks will stand this, so the mills are moved from time to time to fresh belts of forest. These mills are chiefly owned by big companies, and our crofter friend, if he can call up the requisite energy, can find occupation while the timber is being got out in his vicinity. The "logging" or felling of the trees and cross-cutting the trunks into lengths, and the "skidding" or bringing down of these with teams to the millsite, are the jobs offering. For his services the native either gets a cash wage, and swells in his feelings for the time being to the dimensions of a Croesus, or else he takes his pay in planks, which he piles in a rick on his homestead and gloats over for some years, dreaming of the frame dwelling he will erect. This, if and when it is at length erected, is apt, among the surrounding primitive structures, and in its rough-andtumble setting, to resemble the gold button on the tow shirt. Somehow the plain old log shack, rough-hewn, one-ohambered, chinked and daubed, hits the eye, in the eternal fitness of things, as the proper article there. You recognise it at sight as being identical, to a log, with the residence depicted as the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, and introduced into the front pages of American history school-books. It is still built in outlying parts of the States, maybe as an incentive to the buds of the backwoods in starting on the first lap of their career "from log cabin to White House." Beneath the unkind surface of the Blue Ridge region are many valuable minerals, evidenced by the frequency of iron gossan, sulphate of copper of his "hot-air" prospective, signs, the outcropping of "fool's gold" or pyrites, the scales of mica, and the traces of more precious metals. Many of the lodes are probably too deep and too pockety ever to be worked successfully. Some, on the other hand, likely want only exploiting to transform them into paying mines. The orofter is aware that the land he owns is a wedge of the earth clear down to its centre, and that all its cubic contents are his, but as to any ideas on minerals and mines, his head is as empty as a last year's bird's - nest. At rare intervals somebody with a slight discernment of mining possibilities drifts into the country and takes an option, which he gets for the asking, on the more promising spots; and under the influence the simple-minded owner sees TRAQUAIR'S STALK. BY "LINESMAN." LORD DONALD TRAQUAIR was bored; which was the more extraordinary not only because it was the first time in his life he had ever been so, but he was engaged on exactly that to which he had always looked forward as the apogee of human excitement, namely, active service. When war had been declared, and he, the youngest son of the Duke of Banff, had been permitted to enrol all his father's keepers, gillies, stalkers, pony-men, trappers, -in short, the whole "permanent staff" of a vast shootingestate-into a corps of Scouts and take them to the front, life had seemed to hold no more for him. To lead troops into action had been the dream of his existence, long before he, the best shot, the best rider, walker, and swimmer for miles around Traquair Towers, had nevertheless failed to gain even the qualifying marks for entrance into Sandhurst and a commission. That had been a bitter blow; but he was later actually thankful he had not passed, for instead of a subaltern's star, his shoulders carried a crown of a ("temporary ") Major; and instead of toiling behind in the dust of a troop of horse or a company of foot, behold him riding at the head of as stout a band of clansmen as ever sallied from the glens of Traquair. Here were men indeed, his own men, many VOL. CXCII.—NO. MCLXVI. of his own name, all of his acquaintance and friendship,men who had taught him all he knew. He had only to look over his shoulder as they marched down to the troopship-and he did it once every twenty paces-to catch sight of Sandy McKellar, who had dodged the muzzles of his first breechloader; of Rob Farquhar, who had shown him how to "pick up" the pale shadow of a stag on the hillside, and where to steady the sights on the russet blur of its shoulder at two hundred yards range. There was Andy Lamont, hors concours in salmon-fly tying,he who had spent long hours beneath the steep bluffs of the river-bank imparting to young Traquair the mysteries of the Spey cast, and especially of a patent improvement thereto which fired out the fly three yards beyond the range of any known practitioner; he who, when at length beaten at his own specialty by his young master, had smacked the youngster on the back with as much heartiness as he had shaken the small nobleman by the shoulders on seeing a "fush" clumsily gaffed in the shoulder, instead of being deftly clipped in the narrow of the tail, for haulage up a shelving beach. There was Anderson, the trapper, with eyes always downward, and boot-toe so inured to turning over whatever lay loose upon 3 F |