alpine and we are rapidly approaching the climate and flora of Canada.

Animal life

there is almost none. No hum or chirp of humble bee, honey bee, dragon fly, or cricket enlivens the way. Save now and then the scream of the eagle, the cawing of a crow, or the croak of a raven, no sound is ever heard upon these remote summits.

All human sounds have been left far below, the hush is burdensome, and the soughing of the wind but makes the silence oppressively audible. In this awful stillness we welcome the voice of the glorious thunder, "leaping the live crags among," reëchoing from peak to peak and crag to crag, shaking the very granite foundations beneath us. In the midst of the gloom of Erebus we are gladdened by the fierce lightning, flashing lurid and zigzag, sharply piercing the pale mists with lambent tongues of fire, weaving plexures of flame through and through black thunder clouds, broadly inspiring and lighting up the whole vast enveloping cloud mass around us.

At last we draw nigh to Mount Sterling

Gap, on the divide, at the summit of the great Appalachian chain. The valleys and mountains of Tennessee lie behind us. We are about to enter a new-old country, inhabited by a similar, but not by the same, people, dwelling upon a geological foundation of an older series, with a different flora. The people of the slopes behind us were mostly Union people, now Republicans. Retaining most of their primitive characteristics, they have been a little more in contact with the world than their Carolina brethren over the great divide. The forms of speech differ slightly. In the main, the same people without close connections with one another have developed subtle differences easier to note than to describe or define.

The Carolina people here were mostly Southern and are now generally Democrats. This difference, however, was due to political conditions. Beyond this there are surface, not radical, differences such as peoples develop when dwelling apart, each secluded from the great world and that association which makes the cultivated classes in all civ

ilized countries so much of one type that it is hard to assign the nationality of photographic selections from the educated classes of different nations.

The reader may expect a treatise on dialect. Much of my boyhood was spent hunting, fishing, and frolicking with these people. I have since visited the mountain regions of North Carolina and Tennessee a great deal, observing closely the manners, customs, and speech of the people. I can easily trace such peculiarities of speech as I have observed to the days of Chaucer, Sir Thomas More, and Mandeville, but I have heard no dialect. Romance writers have not been able to resist the temptation to surprise their readers with most uncolloquial dialect, which lies chiefly in their own grotesque spelling. Such dialect is as easily read by a cultivated student as a page of the Hamlet quarto of 1603, or the folio of 1623, with their variegated spelling and antique letters. We have here simply the language of tradition, without the growth of written speech. These people have had their antique language handed down to them

from father to son. Hence it has responded slowly to the changes going on amongst the lettered classes. It is still plain English speech, as easily understood when spoken as the talk of the Harvard graduate. I have known a dialect monger to put into the mouth of a mountain character the Yankee "heft" for "weight," or or "guess" for "reckon;" when it may be assumed that the man who uses either "heft" or guess was either in the Federal army or of the household of one who was.

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But here's Mount Sterling Gap, and a good-natured looking fellow waiting astride the fence, of whom we would ask some questions about our road; so that the further journeyings of the Wagonauts are reserved for the next chapter-after we've tapped the canteen. So "here's to you unt your vam'lies; unt may they live long unt prosper."

CHAPTER IV.

“Ef I lived in a groun Log hole, I'd fight for it.”

(A Patriot)

THE rain and fog shut off the fine views

from Mount Sterling, so that the reader is spared any description of them. Upon the high peaks above the gap we could catch glimpses of spruces and firs. These conifers belong to the latitude of Canada, and are found here at altitudes of 5,000 and 6,000 feet respectively. The fir yields balsam in what are called "balsam blisters" on the trunk. But for these "blisters" the inexperienced eye could scarcely tell the fir from the spruce. In grasshopper season these summits are frequented by the pheasant and wild turkey; but generally they are left to the eagle and the raven. The soil is fertile, but too cold to produce anything valuable except grasses and the hellebore. The continual condensation supplies numerous cold