It is, indeed, a small world as we know it to-day. Our philosophers,
reconstructing, as best they may, the science of the ancients from the
treatises, few and sadly incomplete, that have come down to us, affirm
that the earth is an orb and that another continent (perhaps more than
one) lies beyond the rim of the eastern horizon. It may be so, but the
issue is not of practical importance, seeing that there are none who
care to make adventure of the great salty gulf that lies between. And so
the sea keeps its mysteries.

"On the other hand, we count it inadvisable to wander far afield. To
the north, to the west, and to the south stretches the unbroken forest,
and in a few hours a man's legs may easily carry him out of hailing of
the voice of his kind. The waterways form the only regular channels for
social and commercial intercourse, and the busybody and gad-about are
not regarded with favor by honest people.

"It appears highly probable that the human race was virtually
annihilated over the general area of the ancient United States of
America; it persisted only in a few particularly favored localities and
through accidental circumstances of which we know nothing definite. In
our own day, the northern, central, and southern group of colonies
maintain a system of infrequent intercommunication, and beyond that
certain knowledge does not extend. It is possible that mankind may exist
in a degraded state, in many inaccessible corners of this vast continent
of ours, but this is only a possibility, concerning which the theories
of the learned are no more susceptible of proof than are the idle
speculations of the vulgar.

"For convenience, we will accept the popular classification of the human
race as it exists to-day--the Painted Men, the House People, and the
Doomsmen. To take them up in that order.

"The Painted Men, otherwise the Wood Folk, are the descendants of the
Indians of old, but the strain is largely mingled with that of the negro
race, and, with hardly an exception, it is the weaker qualities both of
body and of mind that have been emphasized in the hybrid. From their
Indian forebears they have preserved the custom of painting their face
with crude and hideous pigments upon all occasions of ceremony; hence
their popular designation--the 'Painted Men.'

"The House People are conveniently subdivided into two classes--the
townsmen, or House People proper, and the stockade dwellers,
colloquially, the Stockaders.