ur they be from law-places."

The little community of Misty Ridge was at that time one of the poorest
and most uncivilized in the Cumberland Mountains; many hours' ride, over
trails that were at times impassable, from the nearest railroad;
entirely unknown to the world below save when one of its sons was sent,
for good and sufficient reason, down to the penitentiary. It is a
literary fashion of the day to laud the Kentucky mountaineer as an
uncouth hero, a sort of nobleman in disguise, guarding intact in his
wilderness an inheritance of great racial traits for the strengthening
of future generations. Unfortunately, with his good old Saxon name and
his good old Saxon customs, he also inherits occasionally something of
the moral nature which caused his Saxon ancestor to be deported
overseas. The mountains of Kentucky, and of Tennessee, were settled to
some extent by convicts who had served their time in the English penal
colonies along the sea-coast.

Such an origin, doubtless, might have been claimed by the sparse
settlement on Misty, and time had done nothing to mitigate any curse of
inheritance. The beautiful, barren hills, their hidden riches as yet
undiscovered, yielding so meager a livelihood in return for such bitter
labor, served as ramparts between their people and the world beyond.
Little help at that time reached them from without. Solitude, ignorance,
direst poverty, form a soil in which bodies flourish better than souls,
and even bodies do not flourish exceedingly.

Channing, gazing about at the faces below him, one and all with eyes
fixed upon the fresh loveliness of Jacqueline, had a moment of acute
uneasiness. What right had Benoix, who knew the mountains, to bring the
girl into contact with such bestiality? The odor of packed humanity that
came to his fastidious nostrils was as sickening as the odor of a
bear-pit. He recalled tales of their untamable fierceness. He remembered
the row of guns even now resting in a rack outside the door. His eye,
going inadvertently to the sturdy figure of the clergyman, noticed a
suspicious bulge in the hip-pocket of his riding-breeches. He started.

"Does Benoix carry a pistol?" he whispered to Jacqueline.

"Of course! I've got one, too," she answered cheerfully. "Where's
yours?"

The author felt that he had lost his taste for mountaineering. He looked
in vain for one of the beauteous mountain maids so satisfyingly frequent
in the pages of current fiction. The women