A

CHAPTER II.

We are such stuff as dreams are made of,
And our little lives are rounded with a sleep.

S we drove down to Cosby Creek an in

viting house chilled our ardor for outdoors. Dusk was drawing on and a ravishing odor of frying ham filled the valley. A native was chopping wood at a wood pile. "Stranger, is this Cosby?"

"I reckon hit ar," replied the woodchopper, cutting us off with a surly tone, without looking up or knocking off work. Surliness to strangers is something unusual in the mountains.

"Any corn in this neighborhood?" "Dunno; corn's powerful scyace." "Could we stay all night?"

"Dunno; you-uns mout go up the creek

"Drive on," said Blanc; "you axed him a

civil question and he gave you a sharp answer and went on axing the wood pile."

"His axions spoke louder than his words," said Panier. This sort of execrable punning is what I have to endure. I never wittingly

indulge in that sort of wit.

Crossing Cosby, we drove up a large clear stream, winding along the center of a fertile, well-cultivated valley. No corn was to be had at any of the many houses along the way. At a country store a number of natives gave us good advice. We could camp at a church a mile up the river. Corn could be had, always three or four miles off the road. At last a "mountain boomer," who lived nigh where we expected to camp, would sell us oats, but no corn. When the case of Jim and Frank seemed desperate, a man who'd just bought a half bushel of shelled corn consented to exchange it for forty cents' worth of the contents of the keg-a transaction in which the United States had an interest, which it has lost by the running of the statute of limitations.

In a few minutes we had a rousing fire

crackling and lighting up a grove of fine hemlocks, which surrounded the church; and Ceres was sent to buy oats.

"No wonder dat man hain't gwyne to sell no corn; he's got eight chillin, an he gwyne to need dat corn." This is a prolific region.

The unfortunate man was about thirty. Early marriages, wholesome air and water, a reckless disregard for consequences, and ignorance of Malthus make from eight to a dozen children the rule of households hereabout. Panier enviously remarked that they seemed to raise 'em by coveys. Thus it comes about that these mountain regions have furnished more people to the great West than any other hive of human beings, New England not excepted.

A combined church and schoolhouse occupies the centre of a grassy grove on the banks of the Cosby. The stars are out; the katydids fill woodlands and mountain sides with sweet music; toad-frog and tree-frog make the valley vocal with wild melody, and all of nature's night voices make a sublime Wagnerian symphony. The smoke of our camp

fire spreads itself amongst dark spruce boughs in spectre forms; the bright fire lights up black pine branches, casts weird shadows upon dark masses of foliage and flares with flickering light down long ghostly vistas, deep into the thick wood, lighting up dark trunks, down the long corridors of our sylvan halls. The neighbor creek bubbles and roars a few yards away as it bounds along upon its long journey from the crests of the Alleghanies to the Gulf of Mexico.

The steaming pot is bubbling and singing gleefully, purring with self-satisfaction as it brews that genuine gift of the gods, black coffee, which, by and by, Panier and Blanc will spoil with sugar and add insult to spoliation by lacing it with good liquor, thus spoiling two good things. Broad slices of canvased beef broil and sputter on the coals. Three forked spits, cut from neighbor boughs, hold slices of fragrant breakfast bacon"streak and streak"-to the fire, browning and broiling, dripping upon toasted bread. By and by will be spread here a feast for the gods. Already such sweet incense ascends

amongst spruce and pine boughs and up into the empyrean, with such savors of steaming coffee, toasting bread, and broiling meats, that old Jove on high Olympus disdains his lean fare of nectar and ambrosia, and enviously begins to thunder in the west.

"The canteen?" "Ah, Panier, it was you who first thought of the canteen at lunch," said Blanc. A light nip fresh from that mysterious keg would not harm an infant before supper. Blanc has had the canteen cooling in the creek, not unmindful himself of grog hour. Two to one; well I don't wish to be drenched, and I accept the inevitable. "Hold on there, 'Pete,'" cried Blanc as I made a close inspection of "Job's Coffin" over the fat, laughing side of the smiling canteen.

Now comes the coffee-cooling process. There's nothing so hot as a tin cup; but there's an appetizing delay and a lingering delight in pitching the dark cherry fluid from one tin cup to another after the fashion of Canova's Hebe, as she is represented pitching the matutinal cocktail for the gods on Olympus. We linger lovingly about the out