sed
alternately through gorges cut in the parallel ridges and through
fertile open valleys forming the main floor of the inner valley. Then it
winds up the long ascent of the Alleghany front in a splendid horseshoe
curve. At the top, after a short tunnel, the train emerges in a wholly
different country. The valleys are without order or system. They wind
this way and that. The hills are not long ridges but isolated bits left
between the winding valleys. Here and there beds of coal blacken the
surface, for here we are among the rocks from which the world's largest
coal supply is derived. Since the layers lie horizontally and have never
been compressed, the same material which in the inner valley has been
changed to hard, clean-burning anthracite here remains soft and smoky.

In its southwestern continuation through West Virginia and Kentucky
to Tennessee the plateau maintains many of its Pennsylvanian
characteristics, but it now rises higher and becomes more inaccessible.
The only habitable portions are the bottoms of the valleys, but they are
only wide enough to support a most scanty population. Between them most
of the land is too rough for anything except forests. Hence the people
who live at the bottoms of the valleys are strangely isolated. They see
little or nothing of the world at large or even of their neighbors. The
roads are so few and the trails so difficult that the farmers cannot
easily take their produce to market. Their only recourse has been to
convert their bulky corn into whisky, which occupied little space in
proportion to its value. Since the mountaineer has no other means of
getting ready money, it is not strange that he has become a moonshiner
and has fought bitterly for what he genuinely believed to be his rights
in that occupation. Education has not prospered on the plateau because
the narrowness of the valleys causes the population to be too poor and
too scattered to support schools. For the same reason feuds grow up.
When people live by themselves they become suspicious. Not being used to
dealing with their neighbors, they suspect the motives of all but their
intimate friends. Moreover, in those deep valleys, with their steep
sides and their general inaccessibility, laws cannot easily be enforced,
and therefore each family takes the law into its own hands.

Today the more rugged parts of the Appalachian system are chiefly
important as a hindrance to communication. On the Atlantic slope of the
ol