e Priest slowly, "it's a beautiful evenin'."

Amazed, Jeff stared at him. As a matter of fact, the drizzle of the
afternoon had changed, soon after dark, to a steady downpour. The
judge's limpened hat brim dripped raindrops and his shoulders were
sopping wet, but Jeff had yet to knowingly and wilfully contradict a
prominent white citizen.

"Yas, suh!" he said, half affirmatively, half questioningly. "Is it?"

"It is so!" said Judge Priest. "Every star in the sky shines like a
diamond! Jeff, it's the most beautiful evenin' I ever remember!"

VIII

FISHHEAD

It goes past the powers of my pen to try to describe Reelfoot Lake for
you so that you, reading this, will get the picture of it in your mind
as I have it in mine. For Reelfoot Lake is like no other lake that I
know anything about. It is an afterthought of Creation.

The rest of this continent was made and had dried in the sun for
thousands of years--for millions of years for all I know--before
Reelfoot came to be. It's the newest big thing in nature on this
hemisphere probably, for it was formed by the great earthquake of 1811,
just a little more than a hundred years ago. That earthquake of 1811
surely altered the face of the earth on the then far frontier of this
country. It changed the course of rivers, it converted hills into what
are now the sunk lands of three states, and it turned the solid ground
to jelly and made it roll in waves like the sea. And in the midst of
the retching of the land and the vomiting of the waters it depressed to
varying depths a section of the earth crust sixty miles long, taking it
down--trees, hills, hollows and all; and a crack broke through to the
Mississippi River so that for three days the river ran up stream,
filling the hole.

The result was the largest lake south of the Ohio, lying mostly in
Tennessee, but extending up across what is now the Kentucky line, and
taking its name from a fancied resemblance in its outline to the splay,
reeled foot of a cornfield negro. Niggerwool Swamp, not so far away, may
have got its name from the same man who christened Reelfoot; at least so
it sounds.

Reelfoot is, and has always been, a lake of mystery. In places it is
bottomless. Other places the skeletons of the cypress trees that went
down when the earth sank still stand upright, so that if the sun shines
from the right quarter and the water is less muddy than common, a man
peering face downward into its depths sees, or th