The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls, by
Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

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Title: The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls
1895

Author: Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

Illustrator: A. B. Frost

Release Date: November 26, 2007 [EBook #23631]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MOONSHINERS ***

Produced by David Widger

THE MOONSHINERS AT HOHO-HEBEE FALLS

By Charles Egbert Craddock

1895

I

If the mission of the little school-house in Holly Cove was to impress
upon the youthful mind a comprehension and appreciation of the eternal
verities of nature, its site could hardly have been better chosen. All
along the eastern horizon deployed the endless files of the Great Smoky
Mountains--blue and sunlit, with now and again the apparition of an
unfamiliar peak, hovering like a straggler in the far-distant rear,
and made visible for the nonce by some exceptional clarification of the
atmosphere; or lowering, gray, stern; or with ranks of clouds hanging on
their flanks, while all the artillery of heaven whirled about them, and
the whole world quaked beneath the flash and roar of its volleys. The
seasons successively painted the great landscape--spring, with its
timorous touch, its illumined haze, its tender, tentative green and gray
and yellow; summer, with its flush of completion, its deep, luscious,
definite verdure, and the golden richness of fruition; autumn, with
a full brush and all chromatic splendors; winter, in melancholy sepia
tones, black and brown and many sad variations of the pallors of white.
So high was the little structure on the side of a transverse ridge that
it commanded a vast field of sky above the wooded ranges; and in the
immediate foreground, down between the slopes which were cleft to
the heart, was the river, resplendent with the reflected moods of the
heavens. In this deep gorge the winds and the pines chanted like a Greek
chorus; the waves continuously murmured an intricate rune, as if conning
it by frequent repetition; a bird would call out from the upper air some
joyous apothegm in